Monopolies and Politics Workshop Webinar Series - Latin America: Monopolies, Dictatorships and Populism

Latin American countries shifted dramatically over the last half-century, with many nations transitioning from right-wing military dictatorships to democracies, populist governments, or even left-wing dictatorships. Join the Stigler Center for a conversation with Brandeis University’s Aldo Musacchio and MIT’s Ben Ross Schneider on the role played by concentrated economic power in the rise and fall of Latin America’s various governing structures. The conversation will be moderated by Stigler Center Fellow Filippo Lancieri.

The Stigler Center’s 2020 Antitrust and Competition Conference (rescheduled for fall 2020 due to the COVID-19 crisis) will discuss the interconnection between monopolies and politics. Our new pre-conference Monopolies and Politics Workshop Webinar Series will explore in greater detail some of the conference topics, including the extent to which firms can leverage their market power to capture governmental policy—a topic particularly relevant when bailouts and stimulus programs around the world are disbursing trillions of dollars of taxpayer money in an attempt to help mitigate the disastrous economic consequences of the COVID-19 epidemic.

Aldo Musacchio is Professor of International Business at Brandeis University and Director of the Brazil and Latin America Initiatives at IBS. He is a specialist on strategy and corporate governance in multinationals; innovation and industrial policy in emerging markets; among other topics. Musacchio teaches Strategy in Emerging Markets for graduate students and Competitive Strategy (in technology firms) for undergraduate students. His research focuses on the internationalization strategies of state-owned enterprises and the innovation behavior of large multinationals with government financial support. In his book, Reinventing State Capitalism: Leviathan in Business, Brazil and Beyond (Harvard Press, 2014), Musacchio and his coauthor Sergio G. Lazzarini study the corporate governance reforms of state-owned enterprises around the world and look into the pitfalls of such reforms. They also study the advantages and disadvantages firms get when they receive financial support from their home country governments. His forthcoming book Fixing State-Owned Enterprises in Latin America: Old Problems, New Solutions, provides policy insights on how to reform the ownership and management of these firms with minimal political cost. @MusacchioAldo

Ben Ross Schneider is the Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the MIT Brazil program. Prior to joining the department in 2008, Schneider taught at Princeton University and Northwestern University. Schneider's teaching and research interests fall within the general fields of comparative politics, political economy, and Latin American politics. His books include Reinventing Leviathan: The Politics of Administrative Reform in Developing Countries (2003), Business Politics and the State in 20th Century Latin America (2004), Hierarchical Capitalism in Latin America: Business, Labor, and the Challenges of Equitable Development (2013), Designing Industrial Policy in Latin America: Business-Government Relations and the New Developmentalism (2015), and New Order and Progress: Democracy and Development in Brazil (2016). He also has published on topics such as democratization, technocracy, education politics, the developmental state, business groups, industrial policy, and comparative bureaucracy.

Filippo Lancieri (moderator) is a research fellow at the Stigler Center and a JSD Candidate at the University of Chicago Law School. His research interests include antitrust, data protection and the political economy of regulation more broadly and his JSD thesis explores the challenges of regulating digital markets. Filippo’s work has appeared in the University of Chicago Law Review, the Antitrust Law Journal and the Journal of Antitrust Enforcement, among others. Filippo also coordinated the Stigler Center Committee on Digital Platforms.@LancieriFilippo

The webinar will take place from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. CDT via Zoom.

Slides: Aldo Musacchio 
Slides: Ben Ross Schneider

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