“An Elephants’ Graveyard”: the Deregulation of American Industry in the Late Twentieth Century

Richard Langlois

No 2021-11, Working papers from University of Connecticut, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper is an excerpt from a larger book project called The Corporation and the Twentieth Century, which chronicles and interprets the institutional and economic history – the life and times, if you will – of American business in the twentieth century. This excerpt examines the era of industrial deregulation of the late twentieth century. As had been the case with financial deregulation, it argues, industrial deregulation and the internationalization of trade were largely a manifestation of the misalignment of the postwar regulatory regime with the realities of economic growth. This misalignment created profit opportunities for entrepreneurs not only in the realm of technology but also, and perhaps more crucially, in the realm of institutions. In some cases, entrepreneurs would expend resources in order to foment political change. In other cases, technological and institutional innovation, aided at times by the depredations of the regulation itself, would so reduce the available rents of a regulatory regime that its supporting coalition would collapse

Keywords: Deregulation; institutional innovation; technological change; antitrust (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 K21 L4 L51 L52 L6 L9 N42 N62 N72 N82 O3 P P12 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2021-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ent, nep-his, nep-ind, nep-isf, nep-law and nep-reg
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uct:uconnp:2021-11

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