Our Corporate Power Program

Today, a few thousand unelected corporate executives and shareholders make decisions that affect the way trillions of dollars move through the economy. For decades, corporate America has wielded its outsized influence to consolidate its power, resulting in a lopsided economy dominated by a small number of large, integrated firms that control essential decisions around resource production and distribution—crowding out opportunities for a low-carbon and high-care economy.

Roosevelt’s Corporate Power team aims to help rethink and rewrite the rules guiding how corporate America functions—and who it serves—so that firms contribute to a more equitable economy through innovation and public value rather than drive divisions through the extraction of private wealth for a few. Our research explores avenues to protect the public by redistributing power within, power over, and power between firms so that super-sized corporations are once again rule-takers and no longer rule-makers. Our team develops cutting-edge research both diagnosing the mechanics of corporate power and holding up new policy solutions. From corporate governance reform to taxation to antitrust, we look for new solutions to policy regimes long entrenched by the failed neoliberal paradigms of the past.

Guided by this emerging economic worldview, the Corporate Power program seeks to expose the inherent contradictions of current shareholder-first business models, while simultaneously weaving together a coherent set of common-sense alternatives for a thriving economy and an inclusive multi-racial democracy.

Watch Emily DiVito’s testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on July 20, 2023.