Laws

Who owns knowledge?

Predetermined profit margins and prices hidden in the back end of a transaction are really just market failures.

Current tests for mergers are in practice deeply flawed.

Antitrust econometrics relies on often-implausible assumptions

The contrasting ideologies at play in this tech sector mirror the conflicting ideologies in economics

Despite the accumulation of serious and unsolvable problems, the Consumer Welfare Standard survives and continues to be taught to students for reasons unrelated to theoretical consistency and empirical confirmation.

The Consumer Welfare Standard is severely limited or defective, preventing it from being an appropriate standard for modern antitrust.

Economist Cristina Caffarra, a leader in competition and antitrust, warns that ever-expanding tech giants raise concerns about the extent of their power.

The Consumer Welfare Standard of antitrust is outdated and defective

The Consumer Welfare Standard of antitrust is outdated and defective

Conservative legal theory is based on a shoddy definition of what constitutes “efficiency”

Conservative legal theory is based on a shoddy definition of what constitutes “efficiency”

Over and over again, US government policies designed to transfer and create wealth and economic opportunity were restricted to whites by design.

What will empower a worker to be able to make greater demands on a profitable economy or employer? The answer may be summed up in one word: leverage.

Prof. Oliver Hart and Justice A. K. Jayasankaran Nambiar in conversation

Prof. Oliver Hart delivers the opening lecture of INET and ITT Bombay’s Samvaad lecture.

Big Tech companies are swallowing up nascent competitors. Why aren’t regulators paying attention?

The state has long used law to back private money—with dire consequences, then and now

The Chicago School’s weakening of antitrust law hurt the economy

This paper presents an historical analysis of the antitrust laws.

“Facebook is undermining our country, our democracy.”

Facebook engaged in an elaborate bait and switch on user data: Privacy disappeared when competition did. Laws governing competition could change that.

Stigmatizing and relegating an activity to the shadows doesn’t improve anyone’s welfare

Organized by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), New Delhi in collaboration with the Institute of New Economic Thinking, New York, the aim of the Law Economics Policy Conference series is to bring together legal, economic, and public policy thinkers to consider a variety of real world issues in India in a holistic manner.

Bill Janeway explains why “efficiency is the enemy of innovation,” and how venture capitalists and the state advance technological change

The World Economic Roundtable seeks to help the business, investment, and policy communities understand ongoing changes in the world economy and to promote a discussion of ideas that can advance the goal of a widely shared global prosperity.

The Idea That Businesses Exist Solely to Enrich Shareholders Is Harmful Nonsense

Price gouging in the US pharmaceutical drug industry goes back more than three decades.

Conventional wisdom has it that the primary function of the stock market is to raise cash for companies for the purpose of investing in productive capabilities. The conventional wisdom is wrong.

A look at America’s strange and dangerous approach to medicine, and how to fix it

Along the entire “innovation chain” — from research and development, to production and commercialization — government and private sectors have very different roles to play.

Institute scholar Arjun Jayadev argues that while TPP is dead, its damaging legacy on intellectual property rights is likely to shape future bilateral trade agreements

Flows of goods and services, people and capital have overwhelmed the ability of political processes to accommodate them

In an Al Jazeera documentary “In Search of the Great American Job”, Institute scholar William Lazonick offers some arch insights into the relationship between financialization — particularly the “shareholder value” ideology in corporations, which drives the transfer of profits to shareholders through stock buybacks — and job creation and inequality.

Offshoring manufacturing may have hurt many working people in America, but professionals and intellectual property have been robustly protected

Many Americans have expressed outrage over Pfizer’s plan, through its merger with Allergan, to move its tax home from the United States to Ireland. Now, in a New York Times op-ed, Carl Icahn, the billionaire corporate raider turned hedge fund activist, has joined the chorus. He labels the Pfizer-Allergan deal a “travesty,” blaming the U.S.’s “uncompetitive international tax system.”

Why are we paying for corporate behavior that crushes innovation, cheats taxpayers, cost jobs, and heightens inequality?

John Kay shares findings from his new book, Other People’s Money, and his insights on changing the financial sector.

Here we are, some 7 years after the Great Financial Crisis, and not one senior banking executive has gone to jail.

We discuss recent work on bounded rationality and learning in relation to Soros’ principle of reflexivity and stress the empirical importance of non-rational, almost self-fulfilling equilibria in positive feedback systems.

This research project improves our understanding of the effects of intellectual property rights—and in particular copyrights—on creativity and innovation.

This paper is based on a social accounting matrix (SAM) which incorporates the size distribution of income based on data from the BEA national accounts, the widely discussed 2012 CBO distribution study, and BLS consumer surveys.

The financial crisis of 2008, and the subsequent worldwide economic depression and continuing dislocation, have made little to no impression on the way macroeconomics is taught at the university level, from Economics 101 through graduate school. It has been “business as usual’, which (it seems to me) means an almost studious avoidance of any attempt to acquire knowledge of how monetary economies actually work.

How to rebalance Chinese economy has become a topic of heated discussion. After years of fast economic expansion, now China faces a difficult crossroad. The global financial crisis provided clear evidence that China’s traditional export-driven strategy is vulnerable to slumps of the external demand.

When the Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics (CORE) project launched on 11 November 2013 at Her Majesty’s Treasury in London, we promised that we would be ‘teaching economics as if the last three decades had happened’. The last six months have shown us that this is challenging but we are well on our way to doing it.

Economics has advanced an enormous distance from the Walrasian paradigm and the Neoclassical synthesis. However, undergraduate curriculums continue to heavily favour these views of what economics is and what tools it provides for understanding contemporarypublic problems.

The president of INET, Johnson(2013) emphasized the importance of Asian tradition for building up the New Economic Thinking. “It ismy sense that the Asian tradition of thought and philosophical perspective are better suited to embracing this radical uncertainty and living in the experimentation of the adaptive complex system that our world appears to resemble than are the Western mindsets that are the product of the Cartesian Enlightenment.” In the summary he argues that “As the Asian societies continue to evolve the architects will be better served by an new economics for Asia and from Asia that is based on the notions of radical uncertainty, complex adaptive systems, mimetic desire, the inseparability of politics and economics, and a vision of a world where policy makers are themselves less knowing and less capable of control than we often yearn to believe is within their power.”

The Arab Spring has been a fundamental event in the Arab world and yet among Middle East scholars, there is great intellectual and analytical debate about the degree of political change or continuity that the Arab Spring had produced. As reverberations of the global economic crisis have continued and the international rules of the game have fundamentally remained unchanged, the demand on post-Arab Spring governments to change policy course is high.

In the United States achieving equal opportunity in postsecondary education is typically described in terms of enrolling more underrepresented groups into the selective colleges. The belief is that if this step is accomplished it will have a fundamental impact on the problem of inequality at the national level. However, what if there are not enough places in selective colleges to accomplish this goal? What if the selective colleges do not have enough capacity to make a significant impact in the problem of serving students from underrepresented groups withdemonstrated high abilities?

The chief obstacle to transformative change in the contemporary Middle East is the region-wide configuration of social power which was consolidated in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and which survived the transition from empire to post-Ottoman independent states largely intact.

The term human capital describes a set of skills, strengths and know-how that are valuable—both in the narrow sense of being “commercially valuable” (Lindsey, 2013), and the wider one of contributing to a flourishing, deliberate, purposeful life.As Heckman (2014) puts it: “Skills are capacities to act [emphasis added]…They shapeexpectations, constraints, and information” (p. 6).

While successive waves of democratization over the last half century changed the political landscape in various regions of the world, the authoritarian regimes have maintained their hold on power in the Arab region.

Debate about the pension crises has centered on certain questions such as: Are greedy government workers bankrupting states? Arepension-slashing politicians backed by big money saving the day? Or do the budget problems of state and localgovernments have more to do with wasteful corporate subsidies than pensions? What are the real policy solutions to the pressures placed on pensions?”

Economists discussing the problem of radical uncertainty commonly invoke Frank Knight’s classic definition in Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, but only rarely venture to explore the broader contours of his argument.

Cyberwar is very much in the news these days. It is tempting to try to understand the economics of such an activity, if only qualitatively. What effort is required? What can such attacks accomplish? What does this say, if anything,about the likelihood of cyberwar?

Five years after the end of the Great Recession, corporate profits are high and the stock market is booming. Yet most Americans are not sharing in the apparent prosperity.

This article studies the reasons for the under-investment in research vs. development in the decentralized equilibrium and argues that this bias provides a micro-foundation for the government direct involvement in conducting applied research rather than just financing it.

In recent decades, market values have crowded out non- market norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?

The Institute for New Economic Thinking joined the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in holding its fifth Annual Conference from April 10 to April 12, 2014 in Toronto.

The fall of 2008 was scary. For most people, the aftermath of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy resembled a major earthquake with strong aftershocks. Official narratives have promoted the image of the crisis as a rare, unpreventable and unforeseen natural disaster, the “100-year flood.” Policymakers emphasize the extraordinary measures they have taken to prevent the system from collapsing and to support recovery since.

Innovation, the commercialization of invention, is both desirable and necessary for growth and higher living standards in modern economies. Innovation’s contribution to the economy is being measured increasingly more precisely, and its contribution has been assessed aseconomically important and growing.

Since the outbreak of the Greek debt crisis at the end of 2009, the Eurozone finds itself in an unprecedented debt crisis.

“You are now leaving the world as you know it.”

Can China lead the way on innovation?

Healthy innovation economies are the main driver of prosperity in the 21st century. But the three players that have traditionally sponsored basic research and invention in those economies are no longer willing or able to perform that role.

The Foundations of Economic Prosperity: The Lessons of Innovation Process and History

Investment in productive capabilities provides the foundation for economic growth.

Government intervention is often perceived as a constraint on market forces and thereby on economic growth.