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When Big Tech Firms Buy Startups, Antitrust Enforcers Should Take Notice

A frequent argument made in favor of allowing Big Tech firms to acquire smaller firms is that permissive merger policy promotes innovative entry. A new study shows that permissive merger policy may in fact discourage entrants’ pre-merger innovation. Commentators across the political spectrum are concerned that Big Tech firms—especially Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft—have become too powerful and too entrenched, in part by acquiring other firms. For example,...

RESEARCH

Inequality

Police Stops of Black Drivers Increase Following Trump Rallies, New Study Suggests

Pauline Grosjean, Federico Masera, Hasin Yousaf

Corporate Governance

How Hedge Fund Performance Fees Fail Investors

Itzhak Ben-David, Justin Birru, Andrea Rossi

COMMENTARIES

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: The Covid Storm, the Greatest Debt Binge, and How Did the Internet Get So Bad?

Bethany McLean

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles...

PODCAST

A New Capitalisn’t Episode

READING LIST

The Covid-19 Economy

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Coronavirus

Why Social Distancing Measures Seem Less Effective in the US

Gabriele Borg, Samuele Giambra, Samsun Knight

Guidelines assume that the less people move around, the less likely they are to be in contact. However, phone location data show...

Bailout

The Childcare Barriers to Putting America Back to Work

Jonathan Dingel, Christina Patterson, Joseph Vavra

Substantial fractions of the US labor force have children at home and will likely face obstacles in returning to work if childcare...

Bailout

The Paycheck Protection Program, Meant to Prevent Mass Layoffs, Missed Its Target

Joao Granja, Christos Makridi, Constantine Yannelis, Eric Zwick

A new study shows that CARES Act funds to support small companies and prevent mass layoffs did not flow to areas more...

Coronavirus

How Are Americans Coping With the Covid-19 Crisis? 7 Key Findings From a Household Survey

Marianne Bertrand, Guglielmo Briscese, Maddalena Grignani

New research from the Rustandy Center and the Poverty Lab at the University of Chicago finds that lower-income Americans, especially women,...

READING LIST

Police Reform

In the aftermath of the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of white police officers in Minneapolis and the ensuing global outrage, an unprecedented focus on the causes of police violence and misconduct has emerged. Should the police be “defunded,” as many protesters demand, or should US law enforcement reformed in other ways? ProMarket investigates.

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News

Prison Labor Can Create Perverse Incentives for Incarceration and Reduce Trust in Legal Institutions

Belinda Archibong, Nonso Obikili

Government proponents of prison labor should be mindful of the potential for negative effects, including increased incarceration rates and citizens’ deteriorating views...

News

Few Bad Apples? New Study Finds That 40 Percent of Officers in a Large Police Force Are Discriminatory

Felipe Goncalves, Steven Mello

A new paper seeks to examine whether police misbehavior is concentrated or diffuse by identifying whether highway patrol officers in Florida are...

News

What is the Connection Between Collective Bargaining and Police Officer Misconduct? Evidence from Florida

Dhammika Dharmapala, Richard H. McAdams, John Rappaport

A working paper finds that after sheriffs’ deputies in Florida were allowed to unionize, violent incidents increased by 40 percent.

Capitalisn't

Should We Defund the Police? A New Capitalisn’t Reading List

ProMarket writers

In this episode of the Capitalisn't podcast, Kate and Luigi take an economist's look at the concept of defunding the police.

Teaching

Antitrust and Competition

The United States: An Exceptional Case? A Webinar With Stephen Haber, Richard R. John, and Luigi Zingales

ProMarket writers

Many see the US as a land where free markets and antitrust enforcement have historically kept monopolies under control. But is that really the case? Watch a conversation between Stanford University professor Stephen Haber, Columbia University professor Richard R. John, and Luigi Zingales. The Stigler Center’s Monopolies and Politics Workshop Webinar Series explores the interconnection between monopolies and politics, and the historical evidence of monopolies capturing national governments and...

Coronavirus

The Economic and Social Implications of Racial Disparities: A Webinar With Lisa Cook

ProMarket writers

Michigan State University professor Lisa Cook joined Princeton’s Bendheim Center for Finance to discuss how violence impacts innovation, as well as the economic and societal fissures exposed by Covid-19. On...

Antitrust and Competition

Covid-19 and Amazon’s Future: a Webinar With Stacy Mitchell, Steven Kaplan, and Jacob Schlesinger

ProMarket writers

As part of the Stigler Center’s Political Economy of Covid-19 Series of online programming, which explores the economic and political implications of Covid-19 with leading academics and experts, we recently hosted a conversation between Stacy Mitchell, co-director...