IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/cbscwp/315.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Political Economy of the Decline in Antitrust Enforcement in the United States

Author

Listed:
  • Lancieri, Filippo
  • Posner, Eric
  • Zingales, Luigi

Abstract

Antitrust enforcement in the United States has declined since the 1960s. We investigate the political causes of this decline by looking at who made the crucial decisions and the strength of their popular mandate. Using a novel framework to understand the determinants of regulatory capture and several new datasets, we find that there was no public support for the weakening of antitrust enforcement. The decline in antitrust enforcement was the result of a collection of technocratic decisions made in politically unaccountable ways, mostly by regulators and judges. Behind the scenes, big business played a major role in influencing these agents; but other factors (like the increase in private sector pay relative to government pay) and intellectual currents mattered as well.

Suggested Citation

  • Lancieri, Filippo & Posner, Eric & Zingales, Luigi, 2022. "The Political Economy of the Decline in Antitrust Enforcement in the United States," Working Papers 315, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:cbscwp:315
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/262717/1/wp315.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Francesco Trebbi & Miao Ben Zhang, 2022. "The Cost of Regulatory Compliance in the United States," NBER Working Papers 30691, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Olimpia Cutinelli Rendina, 2023. "Lobbying or Innovation: Who Does What Against Foreign Competition," Working Papers halshs-03970033, HAL.
    3. Christian Reiner & Christian Bellak, 2023. "Hat die ökonomische Macht von Unternehmen in Österreich zugenommen? Teil 1," Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft - WuG, Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte für Wien, Abteilung Wirtschaftswissenschaft und Statistik, vol. 49(1), pages 21-59.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:cbscwp:315. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/gsuchus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.