In the News
In The News 2023
Luigi Zingales y sus advertencias sobre las AFP y los conglomerados
August 23, 2023 | Centro Competencia
El viernes 11 de agosto, el economista Luigi Zingales (PhD en economía del MIT y profesor en la Universidad de Chicago) dictó en la Facultad de Economía y Negocios de la Universidad de Chile (FEN) una Conferencia Internacional por la celebración de los 50 años de la revista “Estudios de Economía” de la FEN.
What Does “Stakeholder Capitalism” Mean to You?
August 15, 2023 | Harvard Business Review
The economists Roy Shapira and Luigi Zingales have shown, for example, that polluting the environment, even when it is against the law and harmful to public health, can sometimes maximize long-term value for shareholders.
If Big Tech Is a Problem, What’s the Solution?
August 7, 2023 | Chicago Booth Review
“Antitrust in the 1960s and early ’70s was a mess,” says Chicago Booth’s Luigi Zingales. It was unclear, he says, exactly what it was trying to accomplish. “One of the reasons the Chicago push succeeded is because it was logical and simple in a world in which there was a lot of contradiction and tension.”
Luigi Zingales: “Chile debería pensar más seriamente en tener un impuesto al patrimonio”
August 6, 2023 | La Tercera
Este jueves y viernes estará en Santiago el destacado economista italiano Luigi Zingales, autor de los famosos libros “Salvando al capitalismo de los capitalistas” (junto a Raghuram Rajan) y “Capitalismo para la gente”.
How to save markets to become free again
July 12, 2023 | The New Times
Professor Luigi Zingales whose “Crony Capitalism” course has become so popular over the years – which myself I had fun attending during this last Spring quarter – has been a strong advocate of how to fix markets and break monopolies.
Should investors stay and fight for green change — or divest?
July 5, 2023 | Financial Times
Socially conscious investors are increasingly pushing funds to divest certain shareholdings. But in most cases, they would do better to retain their stakes and engage with management to bring about reform, Booth’s Luigi Zingales explains in a recent op-ed.
ESG funds: Greenwashing Wall Street
June 30, 2023 | Quartz
“These findings cast doubt on the hope that self-regulation would suffice to undertake a green transition. Firms seem very responsive to the public mood in words and programs. Better outcomes? Not yet!” —Luigi Zingales, finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, writing in a shareholder value study
ESG: Are Investors Willing to Pay for Social Responsibility?
June 30, 2023 | CCR Corp
Here’s an excerpt from a ProMarket blog by one of the study’s authors: "Our empirical analysis provides the following main results. First, we find that when making investment decisions, individuals are indeed willing to forgo some returns in order to promote social interests: The average willingness to pay in our experiment varies..."
Bank failures now happen at warp speed. The Fed needs to do more to stop them.
June 28, 2023 | MSN
My colleagues Tano Santos, Naz Koont, and Luigi Zingales find that digital banking undermines financial stability. When interest rates rise and keeping money in a low-interest account becomes costly, clients of traditional banks stick with their deposits.
Why Joe Biden’s trustbusters have fallen short of their ambitions
June 21, 2023 | The Economist
How successful have they been? They have certainly reframed public thinking about trustbusting. “Six years ago, if you didn’t buy into the consumer-welfare standard, you weren’t a serious person. Now that’s completely gone,” says Luigi Zingales, a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
What I Learned About ‘Woke’ Capital and Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago
June 9, 2023 | Wall Street Journal
As Luigi Zingales, a Chicago finance professor, puts it, we now have the politicization of the corporate world because we have corporatization of the political world. Corporate money and influence have invaded politics since the 1970s and even Friedman, a big supporter of liberty, might not like it.
Was Bailing out the Silicon Valley Bank Depositors the Right Decision?
June 6, 2023 | Conversable Economist
Was that decision appropriate? Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales make the case against in “Riskless Capitalism” (Finance & Development, June 2023).
Just how safe are credit unions?
June 2, 2023 | Marketplace
Banks are trying to maximize their return on equity, and that can lead them to take bigger chances with their lending or investments, said Luigi Zingales, a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
"Riskless Capitalism", by Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales
June 1, 2023 | IMF Finance & Development Magazine
Did uninsured depositors in the failed Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) need to be saved? The argument is that even though everyone knew that deposits over $250,000 were uninsured, if uninsured depositors had not been made whole, panic would have coursed through the banking system.
What ESG goals actually change at companies that set them
May 30, 2023 | Quartz
“I had been interested in the topic of the objective of the firm for a long time,” says Luigi Zingales, one of the study’s co-authors. He’d also seen sentiment fluctuate on the subject of what companies thought they were for.
Regional bank crisis may be far from over, experts warn
May 27, 2023 | Marketwatch
Researchers led by economist Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago published an analysis in April that showed that banks with well-functioning mobile applications experienced greater deposit flight when the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates than those without those digital tools.
(Dis)Belief in Banking
May 25, 2023 | Chartered Banker
Professor Luigi Zingales, University of Chicago Booth School of Business and co-host of the podcast Capitalisn’t, believes that trust is a complex matter. “When you think about trust, there is a country or institutional average that is very much related to the way people see society as a whole. People are much more trusting in Sweden than they are, for example, in Brazil. If you ask a Brazilian how much he trusts individuals, he’ll say not very much, and when asked how much he trusts banks, he’ll say the same. And in Sweden it’s high for both.
There are risks but also big potential benefits from digital payments
May 15, 2023 | The Economist
A more novel risk from digital finance may be financial instability. A recent paper by Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago and co-authors finds that deposit outflows from digital banks were greater than those from traditional banks in the second quarter of 2022.
How Elon Musk upended Twitter and his own reputation in 6 months as CEO
April 27, 2023 | CNN
“I give him some credit for trying a different business model,” indicates Luigi Zingales of Chicago Booth. “I think the business model based on user data is quite abusive.”
Interview with Luigi Zingales: Saving capitalism from itself—and for the people
April 17, 2023 | Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
By his own admission, Luigi Zingales might not be a conventional pick for the Institute Advisory Board. He holds a chair in entrepreneurship and corporate finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, preparing MBAs destined for the “1 percent” on the home turf of Milton Friedman. Through popular books, op-eds, the publication ProMarket, and the podcast Capitalisn’t, the genial economist has built a reputation as a happy warrior for capitalism and free enterprise.
Is Economics Self-Correcting?
April 7, 2023 | The American Prospect
Then I got in touch with Luigi Zingales.Zingales heads the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago, and criticized the old orthodoxy in two important books, A Capitalism for the People (2012) and Saving Capitalism From the Capitalists (with Raghuram Rajan, 2003) and in his ongoing work at his center, which includes regular media convenings to expose journalists who cover economics to a broader brand of scholarly economic inquiry.
Surveillance: Banks In 4% Rate World
April 6, 2023 | Bloomberg
Luigi Zingales, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Professor of Finance says the banking system can't operate with interest rates at 4%. Thierry Wizman, Macquarie Global Interest Rates and Currencies Strategist says it's the "speedy, aggressive and abrupt increase" to 4% rates that is the problem
Forbes Money JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon: Banking Crisis Not Over. He’s Right
April 5, 2023 | Forbes
Researchers Naz Koont (Columbia), Tano Santos, and Luigi Zingales (both University of Chicago as well as NBER) found digital deposits flightier, per the red line in the graph (that Luigi was kind enough to let me use) below.
Luigi Zingales: SVB reveals regulatory failings in the age of social media bank runs
March 21, 2023 | Luohan Academy
In a recent episode of Capitalisn’t following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Luigi Zingales interviewed 2022 Nobel laureate and University of Chicago colleague Douglas Diamond. The Diamond-Dybvig model is a key conceptual framework for understanding bank runs, particularly how sound banks can fail due to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Investigate the Bank Failures
March 20, 2023 | City Journal
In a speech last week, President Biden reassured the public that those responsible for the failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank will be held accountable. In the 2008–09 Financial Crisis, this did not happen. For Biden’s promise to be more than rhetoric, his administration must take a proactive role. As the last crisis showed, the normal mechanisms of accountability are broken. Banks paid billions of dollars in fees, but no CEO, board member, auditor, or regulator went to jail. Aside from a few CEOs, nobody even paid a fine out of his own pocket.
Two out of three corporate frauds go undetected, research finds
February 17, 2023 | University of Toronto News
The researchers, which included Adair Morse of the University of California, Berkeley and Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago, used the findings to infer that the real number of companies involved in fraud is at least 10 per cent – about three times greater than their previous estimates. That squares with previous research that has pegged the true incidence of corporate fraud between 10 and 18 per cent.
6 VCs share advice for laid-off tech workers planning to launch startups
February 14, 2023 | TechCrunch
Many tech workers have never experienced a job market like this one. Last year, 1,044 tech companies let go of 159,786 employees, according to Layoffs.fyi. As of this writing, 103,767 workers have been laid off from 345 startups so far in 2023. Many, many more are coming, obviously. Losing a job unexpectedly is more than a financial shock. Many of us invest much of our identity in what we do for a living, which means layoffs can transform social and emotional lives overnight.
Top Int'l Economists to Netanyahu: ‘Undermining Judiciary Detrimental to Prosperity and Growth’
February 8, 2023 | Haaretz
Fifty-six world-renowned economists, including 11 Nobel laureates, have signed an open letter protesting the Benjamin Netanyahu-led government’s plan to weaken Israel’s democracy and damage judicial independence. Among the known and respected economists are Peter Diamond and Daron Acemoglu of MIT; Luigi Zingales and Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago; Eric Maskin, Lucian Bebchuk and Oliver Hart of Harvard; Paul Milgrom of Stanford; and Daniel Kahneman of Princeton.
The Great Fraud Reckoning
January 31, 2023 | Business Insider
"What's cool about Arthur Andersen's bankruptcy is that there was a panic among its clients," one of the study's authors, the University of Chicago professor Luigi Zingales, told me. "They needed to do all sorts of cleanup."
With the Adani Crisis, Is Narendra Modi's House of Cards at Risk?
January 30, 2023 | The Wire
The question of India’s new political economy was first posed in 2012 when analyst Ashish Gupta raised the alarm about bad debts at state banks. The issue was taken up by US-based economist Raghuram Rajan when he was appointed to the Reserve Bank of India in 2014. Rajan and his colleague at Chicago-Booth Luigi Zingales cast India’s problem as one of crony capitalism. Rajan as Reserve Bank Governor only until 2016.
The Justice Department accuses Google of an advertising monopoly
January 26, 2023 | NPR
NPR's Steve Inskeep speaks with University of Chicago professor Luigi Zingales about the federal antitrust case targeting Google's digital advertising business.
Just How Common Is Corporate Fraud?
January 14, 2023 | New York Times
On a recent visit to Salt Lake City, Alexander Dyck ordered Chinese takeout and received a branded fortune cookie wishing him wealth and promoting FTX, presumably packaged before the crypto empire’s epic collapse. “I should have saved it,” he said regretfully.Mr. Dyck is a professor of finance at the University of Toronto, who just published a provocative new study on the pervasiveness of corporate fraud. The study has been passed around in the world of academia in recent weeks, and has become a fascination among general counsels, corporate leaders and investors.
Complexifying Antitrust
January 4, 2023 | BBN Times
Current discussions of US antitrust policy often refer to a “before” and an “after.” A common fable goes that in the “before” from the 1930s up through the early 1970s or so, zealous antitrust regulators protected the public interest. But then, a group of recalcitrant free-market academics led a movement to toss out the wisdom of the past, and instead allowed big business to flourish unfettered and unafraid. Now, a brave but embattled group of reformers is struggling to reestablish the old wisdom of protecting consumers from big firms.