In the News

In The News 2023

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.