At the Blog
On Monday, Patrick Driessen explained how Big Pharma uses the threat of relocation to secure outrageous tax breaks from lawmakers. The result: Pharma booked $400 billion in U.S. drug sales in 2022, yet reported close to zero taxable income. As he writes:
After the passage of Trump’s 2025 tax law, the U.S. corporate marginal effective tax rate on investment in research and development became -47% overall and -146% if debt-financed. Yes, those are negative tax rates for critical investments – every additional dollar Pharma spends on debt-financed research returns $1.46 in tax benefits to the companies.
On Wednesday, Serena Mayeri discussed the long struggle to challenge marriage’s privileged legal status, and what that history means for our moment. As she writes:
Nostalgia for an idealized past—including 1950s patriarchy—long has suffused American conservatism. Project 2025 called for “a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family” comprised of a “married mother, father, and their children,” a Christian nationalist gloss on the heterosexual marital norms that my book’s protagonists challenged. The mid-twentieth-century regime of marital supremacy provides stark reminders of what a return to this vision of family could entail in practice: women trapped in abusive or starkly unequal marriages; fines, incarceration, and family separation for poor women who had nonmarital children; criminalization of nonmarital sex and childbearing; unchecked discrimination in housing, employment, and child custody against individuals who were gay or became pregnant or lived with partners outside of marriage.
In LPE Land
In the Boston Review, Jake Grumbach and Adam Bonica argue that the advantages of moderation have been greatly exaggerated.
Over at Politics & Society, JS Tan and Kathleen Thelen have a new article on Cloud Capitalism and the AI Transition.
In the Yale Law Journal, Jessica Shoemaker & James Fallows Tierney explore how the American legal system laid the foundations for the transformation of farmland into global financial assets.
The political economy of finance summer school is now accepting applications. Open to advanced PhD students, post-doctoral fellows, and early career scholars.
