Antitrust and Competition Conference - Monopolies and Politics Market Power and Money in Politics: An Assessment

Firms compete in markets, and markets are affected by regulators. But can we measure how much incumbent firms try to shape regulations in their favour? Or how much market power leads to political power? Join the Stigler Center for a conversation with Fiona Scott Morton (Yale University) and Tommaso Valletti (Imperial College London), moderated by Filippo Lancieri (University of Chicago Law School), on lobbying and influence in markets. The discussion will be based on a project by Valletti (with Bo Cowgill, Fabrizio Dell’Acqua, and Andrea Prat) that studies how firms lobby in theory and in practice by looking at market data on lobbying spending and political contributions in the US over the past 20 years.

Fiona Scott Morton, Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics, Yale University School of Management

Tommaso Valletti, Professor of Economics; Head of the Department of Economics and Public Policy, Imperial College London 

Filippo Lancieri (moderator), Research Fellow, Stigler Center; JSD Candidate, University of Chicago Law School

Time: 12:15pm - 1:15pm CT

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**The Stigler Center’s 2020 Antitrust and Competition Conference is being held virtually in a series of free webinars from Spring 2020 - Winter 2021. In 2020, the webinar series explored the historical interconnection between market power and political power, discussing examples from Nazi Germany to the UnitedStates, Latin America, Israel and Korea. The second half of the conference series is dedicated to discussion of the trade-offs involved in changes to antitrust policy to address this perceived connection. Topics include whether and how antitrust should be used to promote economic liberty or political liberty, and the development of new methods to assess the political power of large conglomerates. Follow our agenda here.**