rent seeking
Meet the Sugar Barons Who Used Both Sides of American Politics to Get Billions in Subsidies
Meet the Florida-based Fanjul brothers, who inject money to both political parties and dominate an industry that enjoys billions of dollar's worth of subsidies and protections.
Last week,...
(God Knows) Wall Street Isn’t Perfect, But It Has Helped Make the World A Lot Better Off
If the criticisms against Wall Street had been accurate, the U.S. corporate sector today would be ailing. Instead, corporate profits are at historical highs...
Does Wall Street Do “God’s Work”? Or Even Anything Useful?
Bank executives frequently proclaim that Wall Street is vital to the nation’s economy and performs socially valuable services by raising capital, providing liquidity to...
Rents and the High Cost of High Finance: Q&A with Gerald Epstein
New study estimates that the total costs of America’s flawed financial system–rents, misallocation costs, and the costs of the 2008 crisis–will add up to...
Political Rents and Profits in Regulated Industries
A new working paper by James Bessen from Boston University finds that much of the rise in corporate profits since 2000 was caused by political...
Market Power and Inequality: How Big Should Antitrust’s Role Be in Reducing Inequality?
Is the rise of wealth inequality in the United States related to a decline in competition? A new paper answers in the affirmative.
Is the...
Challenges in Measuring Regulatory Capture
We as a society have failed to settle upon what we think are the measurements, the correlates, the red flags, and the warning signs...
Fighting Regulatory Capture in the 21st Century
It should come as no surprise that the movement against regulatory capture is gaining momentum at this particular moment in our nation’s history.
It is...
Is More Antitrust the Answer to Rising Wealth Inequality?
University of Michigan professor Daniel Crane: “The story that somehow antitrust law is dead, that it’s been killed, is wrong. It hasn’t. It’s very...
Horizontal Shareholding, Antitrust, Growth and Inequality
Harvard Law School professor Einer Elhauge goes back to the days of Thurman Arnold, the head of the antitrust division in the FDR administration,...
