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The Complicated Legacy of the “Chicago Boys” in Chile

Economic History Daniel Matamala
How did a group of Chicago-trained economists manage to turn Chile into the cradle of neoliberalism? As the country aims to move away from...
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Meet the Sugar Barons Who Used Both Sides of American Politics to Get Billions in Subsidies

Regulatory Capture Guy Rolnik
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,...
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Who Is to Blame for the 2008 Financial Crisis?

Regulatory Capture Luigi Zingales
The IGM Center at the University of Chicago has asked its American and European economist panel to rate the main causes of the financial...
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The Real Dish on the T-Mobile/Sprint Merger: A Disastrous Deal From the Start

Antitrust and Competition Melody Wang and Fiona Scott Morton
The Trump-era DOJ’s decision to allow the T-Mobile/Sprint merger will go down as one of the worst merger-enforcement mistakes in decades. This merger will...
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Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama Predicts Bitcoin Will Become Worthless

Interviews ProMarket writers
Nobel Prize-winning economist Eugene Fama argues that Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed and predicts it has a near-certain chance of becoming worthless within a decade....
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Donald Trump’s Authoritarian Playbook Is Based on Failures of US Corporate Democracy, not Foreign Dictators

Democracy Sarah C. Haan
Sarah Haan writes that to understand American authoritarianism, it’s less useful to analyze the strategies of elected dictators around the globe than to look at how corporate leaders in the United States have rigged corporate democracy.
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The Paramount Decrees and the Deregulation of Hollywood Studios

Antitrust and Competition G. Vaughn Joy
A landmark antitrust decision on Hollywood will sunset this year, paving the way for more major studios to overpower independent producers and exhibitors. A...
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Study: Politicians Vote Against the Will of Their Constituents 35 Percent of the Time

Regulatory Capture Asher Schechter
New Stigler Center working paper: “To the extent that legislators represent majority opinion, it happens largely because legislators share the opinions of their constituents,...
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The Cantillon Effect: Why Wall Street Gets a Bailout and You Don’t

Antitrust and Competition Matt Stoller
According to the 18th-century French banker and philosopher Richard Cantillon, who benefits when the state prints money is based on its institutional setup. In...
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The Social Responsibility of Business Includes Profits

ESG, Corporate Governance & Future of the Firm Alex Edmans
Profits these days are often seen as a dirty word, but it is wrong to demonize profits. A company’s responsibility is not to sacrifice...
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What Stakeholder Capitalism Can Learn From Milton Friedman

News Alex Edmans
Instead of ridiculing the Friedman doctrine and proclaiming its death, advocates of stakeholder capitalism and responsible investing, like me, can learn a lot from...
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The Most Famous Article on the Theory of the Firm is Widely Misunderstood

Economic History Brian Cheffins
Michael Jensen and William Meckling’s famous 1976 Journal of Financial Economics article has been cited nearly 100,000 times and is often regarded as a...
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The Best Political Economy Books of 2021

Antitrust and Competition Asher Schechter
A scholarly examination of market’s power toll on American workers, the collected works of a pioneering economic thinker, an ambitious narrative of US economic...
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What Economists Mean When They Say “Consumer Welfare Standard”

Antitrust and Competition Leah Samuel and Fiona Scott Morton
Though coined by academic economists, the term “consumer welfare standard” has been captured and changed by the economic school of thought known as the...
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Congress Is Leaning Towards a Big Tech Breakup

Antitrust and Competition Hal Singer
The dominant platforms have proven themselves to be ungovernable. Behavioral remedies, especially those that require continuous oversight, might be pushed aside. The only issue...
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Tech Monopolies Are the Reason the US Now Has a TikTok Problem

Antitrust and Competition Lucas Kunce
Tech platforms like Facebook say we should protect, empower, and celebrate their concentrated power for the sake of America’s national security. But their history...
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Seize the Means of Computation

Antitrust and Competition Cory Doctorow
To regain internet autonomy from Big Tech companies, lower switching costs with legislation that allows new services to subvert network effects and encourage adversarial...
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The TikTok Ban Is a Case Study in American Political Economy 101

Big Tech Utsav Gandhi
Utsav Gandhi relates recent developments in the American government’s ban on TikTok and shows how the case maps over broader debates about conflicts between...
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Google and Facebook’s “Kill Zone”: “We've Taken the Focus Off of Rewarding Genius and Innovation to Rewarding Capital and Scale”

Antitrust and Competition Asher Schechter
A Stigler Center panel explores the implications of tech giants’ dominance on innovation and startups. Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin joined a growing...
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To Build an Equitable Economy, We Must Understand Capitalism’s Racist Heritage

Economic History Elizabeth Kennedy
American capitalism was built on racial exploitation, from the enslavement of Black people to institutionalized discrimination and its structural impact on our nation’s economic...
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Biden Embraces Buy America, Doubles Down on Trade Protection

Industrial Policy Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Megan Hogan
Industrial policy was once so out of fashion that it was jokingly called “the policy that shall not be named.” Now it’s back in...
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ProMarket is dedicated to discussing how competition tends to be subverted by special interests. The posts represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty. For more information, please visit ProMarket Policy.