by Marie Carpenter and William Lazonick Once the global leader in telecommunication systems and the Internet, over the past two decades the United States has fallen behind global competitors, and in particular China, in mobile- communication infrastructure—specifically 5G and Internet…
AIR ANALYSIS
Comments on economic issues and developments published by AIR researchers and affiliates
Sick with “Shareholder Value”: US Pharma’s Financialized Business Model During the Pandemic
by William Lazonick and Öner Tulum On August 16, 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which, among other things, enables Medicare to negotiate the prices of certain high-cost prescription drugs, beginning in 2026.[1] Even though it is just one…
From Financialisation to Innovation in UK Big Pharma
AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline by Öner Tulum, Antonio Andreoni and William Lazonick The tension between innovation and financialisation is central to the business corporation. Innovation entails a ‘retain-and-reinvest’ allocation regime that can form a foundation for stable and equitable economic growth….
Investing in Innovation: Confronting Predatory Value Extraction in the U.S. Corporation
ABSTRACT “Sustainable prosperity” denotes an economy that generates stable and equitable growth for a large and growing middle class. From the 1940s into the 1970s, the United States appeared to be on a trajectory of sustainable prosperity, especially for white-male…
International workshop series on the German system of co-determination organized by WZB, theAIRnet, and IGZA
Together with the Berlin Social Science Center (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung-WZB), the Academic-Industry Research Network (theAIRnet), and the Institute for the History and Future of Work (Institut für die Geschichte und Zukunft der Arbeit-IGZA) organized the German-American workshop series “The…
A major transparency in share buybacks
…After a brief pandemic respite, share buybacks are back with a vengeance. In the third quarter of 2021, S&P 500 companies spent a record $235 billion on buybacks, adding to the $6.3 trillion spent on stock repurchases in the decade before the pandemic….
INET-AIR COVID VACCINE PROJECT
Mass-Producing COVID-19 Vaccines: Capacity, Scale, and Control In collaboration with the Institute for New Economics Thinking (INET), the AIR research team has embarked on a new research project (INET-AIR COVID VACCINE PROJECT) to study and report on the rollout of…
‘Shareholder value’ versus the public good: the case of Germany
“With uncertainty around the world about how and when the coronavirus outbreak will decelerate, whole business sectors have been affected by lockdowns and are facing ruin. In Germany, more than 750,000 companies have put over 12 million employees on reduced working…
Think Big Pharma Won’t Profiteer in the Race to Treat Coronavirus? Think Again.
“In a 2019 Gallup poll, Big Pharma ranked as the most disliked industry in America. Rosie Collington, a graduate student at the University of Copenhagen and a researcher at the Academic-Industry Research Network, knows why: She has studied how major insulin manufacturing…
With working Americans’ survival at stake, the US is bailing out the richest
“Amid a humanitarian crisis compounded by mass layoffs and collapsing economic activity, the last course our legislators should be following is the one they appear to be on right now: bailing out shareholders and executives who, while enriching themselves, spent…
