Saving businesses or market? Crony capitalism in the writings of Luigi Zingales

The term, and the concept of, crony capitalism gained some momentum in the political and economic debate on the Southeast Asian financial crisis of the second half of the 1990s. Luigi Zingales has been arguably one of the economists who not only brought the most relevant contribution to its study but also contributed to popularize it, mainly with the book "Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists", written with Raghuram G. Rajan in 2003. We review the role of the scientific production of Zingales on this concept, considering its uniqueness as regards its application to the analysis of the financial markets and exploiting its consistency in the works written before and after the 2008 financial crisis. We argue that the concept of crony capitalism in the works of Zingales can be isolated as proposing a selfstanding model of the relation between economic and political institutions. [Publisher's text]