Regulatory and academic capture

One of the great insights of University of Chicago economist George Stigler was the phenomenon of “regulatory capture,” which predicted that under certain circumstances, government agencies designed to regulate a particular industry would be likely to end up serving that industry’s interests at the expense of the public.

Much has been written about it since, but I recently came across this interesting article by another UChicago economist, Luigi Zingales, arguing that the phenomenon may apply to academics, too: