Laws

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.