Max von Thun and Claire Lavin argue that the European Commission must revise its merger guidelines to emphasize how competition policy can protect goals beyond prices, including innovation, security, and democracy. This will create a more prosperous European Union.| ProMarket
Erik Hovenkamp and A. Douglas Melamed discuss what Judge Amit Mehta got right and wrong in his remedy decision in the Google Search antitrust case.| ProMarket
In new research, Priyaranjan Jha, Jyotsana Kala, David Neumark, and Antonio Rodriguez-Lopez find that studies arguing higher minimum wages have no employment effect—or even a positive effect—in many labor markets fail to account for how much less minimum wages matter in larger, higher-wage cities.| ProMarket
In new research, Adam Callister, Andrew Granato, and Belisa Pang argue that differing incentives faced by plaintiffs and defendants in “battles of the experts” litigation (like securities suits) leads to structurally higher spending by defendants on expert witnesses. These incentives also apply to any class action suit and many individual suits. They argue that courts should take this dynamic into account and correspondingly be more aggressive in using authority to employ court-appointed ...| ProMarket
Recent years have witnessed a significant wave of initiatives aimed at expanding antitrust’s substantive reach and reinvigorating enforcement, both to counter decades of weakened enforcement and to address contemporary economic realities. These efforts have coincided with calls to “democratize” antitrust by engaging the public in policymaking. Barak Orbach argues that such “democratized antitrust” is impractical, but boundary-pushing dynamics are central to the evolution of antitrus...| ProMarket
Thomas A. Lambert argues that the conservative antitrust program articulated by the antitrust enforcers of the Second Trump administration hardly resembles the conservative antitrust of previous decades. Its divergences will likely end up harming consumers. Read it at ProMarket >>| ProMarket
Rebecca Haw Allensworth writes that the hallmark of the new conservative antitrust is not economic populism but silencing speech that the Trump administration ideologically opposes. Read it at ProMarket >>| ProMarket
President Donald Trump has, across two administrations, sought to lower drug prices for Americans, most recently with executive order “Delivering Most-Favored-Nation Prescription Drug Pricing to American Patients.” Margherita Colangelo explains why his order is unlikely to accomplish its goal. Read it at ProMarket >>| ProMarket
Skewed incentives and the distribution of resources toward corporations have undermined the integrity of scientific research and contributed to the public’s distrust in expertise. Matt Lucky explores the political economy of scientific research and potential reforms to bring scientific research closer to its ideals. Various scholars and commentators have lamented the crisis of public trust in scientific expertise. Read it at ProMarket >>| ProMarket
The European Commission has struggled to tackle excessive prices in Europe, despite evidence of how they arise in relation to market power. Aline Blankertz, Todd Davies, Justine Haekens, and Nicholas Shaxson argue that adopting accounting and financial analysis as part of its toolkit can enable the Commission to understand and act when firms are exploiting their market power. Read it at ProMarket >>| ProMarket
Reed Showalter argues that the suggestion that antitrust can be ringfenced from democracy or the democratic process is erroneous. Antitrust is fundamentally a body of law designed to meet citizens’ basic needs, sustain the marketplace of ideas, and protect democracy and the rule of law. This article is the final contribution to a symposium that explores the relationship between democracy and antitrust. Read it at ProMarket >>| ProMarket
Yunsieg P. Kim argues that economic regulation, including antitrust, can only be democratic if it is the choice of well-informed citizens. This article is part of a symposium that explores the relationship between democracy and antitrust. In theory, Congress passes laws, the antitrust agencies implement them through rules and policies, and the courts assure these rules and policies accord with the relevant statutes and Constitution. Read it at ProMarket >>| ProMarket
Erik Peinert explores the paradoxical relationship between economic concentration and democracy, where economic concentration compromises the democratic process and democratic backsliding also gains momentum by taking advantage of concentrated market actors, whose political power is now impotent, to capture civil society. Read it at ProMarket >>| ProMarket
Sean Sullivan discusses the role public opinion should play in setting antitrust policy and what should be left to the expert economists. Read it at ProMarket >>| ProMarket
Academic Capture| ProMarket
Covid-19| ProMarket
Yael Hochberg is the Ralph S. O’Connor Professor in Entrepreneurship at Rice University and head of the Rice University Entrepreneurship Initiative.| ProMarket
By timing the disclosure of the results of its vaccine trial, Pfizer could have influenced the 2020 presidential election. This is worrisome regardless of whether Pfizer used that power or not. Most people consider it self-evident that corporate campaign contributions impact policy decisions. In fact, when he was running for president in 2016, then-candidate Donald […]| ProMarket
A new study suggests that the Payroll Protection Program’s funds were primarily allocated based on 2019’s estimated payroll, which is how the program was essentially designed. As a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The Payroll Protection Program (PPP) is one of the main policy […]| ProMarket
Regulators worldwide are debating how to rein in Big Tech's dominance over app distribution. Tiffany Tsai and Chuyue Tian explore how Apple’s clash with China’s WeChat complicates standard assumptions about platform competition and what it might mean for the next wave of antitrust enforcement.| ProMarket
Some American policymakers have sought to adopt and adapt aspects and principles of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act in an effort to regulate Big Tech giants. In new research, Giovanna Massarotto writes that the principle ideologies driving American and European antitrust, and the broader political economy, renders the DMA and its principles too foreign for American adoption.| ProMarket
Vikas Kathuria evaluates India’s new ex-ante framework to regulate digital markets. He assesses its divergences from Europe’s archetypal Digital Markets Act and the characteristics of India’s political economy that explain these differences.| ProMarket
Singh graduated from IIT Kharagpur with an integrated BS-MS, majoring in Economics with a minor in Mathematics and Computing and a Micro-specialisation in Artificial Intelligence and Applications. During his undergrad, Singh worked as an RA with the DIME team at The World Bank, where his research was focused on Law and Economics, Environmental Economics, with applications of NLP and ML. His research interests include Law and Economics, Industrial Organization, Political Economy and Conflicts.| ProMarket
Joshua levy is a PhD student in economics at USC and a former research professional at the Stigler Center.| ProMarket
Commentary | ProMarket
Stigler Center News | ProMarket
Antitrust and Competition | ProMarket
In this second installment of a two-part series, David Dubrow and Kent Hiteshew propose reforms to improve disclosure standards in the municipal bond market, exploring both legislative and regulatory approaches. They outline eight key guidelines for enhancing transparency and consistency in municipal offering statements, aiming to bring these disclosures into the modern era and better protect investors.| ProMarket
Commentary | ProMarket
Antitrust and Competition | ProMarket
Surya Gowda reviews Branko Milanović’s Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War and how his analysis of class and inequality applies to contemporary America.| ProMarket
In new research, Kenneth Coriale, Ethan Kaplan, and Daniel Kolliner show how the Republican Party has benefited more from redistricting and gerrymandering. Their research has important implications for political power and representation in today’s era of razor-thin Congressional majorities.| ProMarket
In new research, Tomaso Duso, Joseph Harrington, Carl Kreuzberg, and Geza Sapi demonstrate how their screening tool can aid antitrust authorities in identifying potential collusion between firms through public communications.| ProMarket
Kleptocracy is often thought to plague developing countries, but this grand corruption would be infeasible without the West’s financial and legal plumbing to launder misbegotten gains. American and European government initiatives to remedy their complicity have run aground or even reversed course, particularly in the United States under the new Trump administration, writes Alexander Cooley.| ProMarket
Sharon Block is a Professor of Practice and Executive Director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. Prior to returning to Harvard, she served as the senior official delegated the duties of the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in President Joe Biden’s White House. She also served as a senior advisor to the Biden-Harris Transition team, providing advice to the policy, OMB and Labor Agency Review teams on labor, worker empowerment a...| ProMarket
James Tierney finds that Loper Bright, the latest ruling in a rash of Supreme Court cases undermining the Securities and Exchange Commission’s authority, will limit the agency’s intervention in the market and produce uncertainty for businesses as they guess which rules will survive the judicial review.| ProMarket
Douglas Ross writes that for most of its history, the Federal Trade Commission did not rely on the Chevron doctrine to enforce its mandate to prohibit “unfair methods of competition” and “unfair or deceptive acts or practices.” Thus, Loper Bright will not significantly alter the FTC’s historical role in regulating competition. However, the Chevron doctrine could have been a useful ally to the current FTC, which under Chair Lina Khan has pursued more ambitious rulemaking, such as to ...| ProMarket
In new research, Dominic Smith and Sergio Ocampo show that retail concentration has increased in most markets across the United States, with the expansion of large retail chains driving the trend toward a more concentrated retail landscape. Their findings are based on new product-level census data for all U.S. retailers. They explain the implications of this increased concentration for the everyday shopping experience of clothing, electronics, groceries, and much more.| ProMarket
In new research, David Gindis and Steven G. Medema trace Henry Manne’s entrepreneurial role in the development of the field of law and economics, beginning with a failed venture to bring together economists and legal scholars, but one that established the foundations for later success.| ProMarket
Fabio De Pasquale, a prosecutor at the Milan prosecutor’s office who led the investigation into energy conglomerates Eni and Shell for their alleged involvement in the OPL 245 corruption scandal (both companies have since been found not guilty), discusses how the case reflects the failures of international anti-corruption efforts. ProMarket is publishing a series of articles […]| ProMarket
Steven Salop explores the presumptions and evidence that could undergird Commissioner Melissa Holyoak’s preferred “Raising Rivals’ Cost” approach to the enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act.| ProMarket
Reviewing the literature pioneered by Richard Gilbert and David Newbery, Steven Salop finds that the recent settlement between sports-streaming services Fubo and the Venu Sports joint venture of Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery was fully predictable. But the settlement takes on greater complexity in light of the termination of joint venture a week later […]| ProMarket
Steven C. Salop writes that only Google’s full divestiture of its Android operating system can avoid incentives on the part of Android and Google to preference Google’s apps, including its search engine, and stifle competition.| ProMarket
Steven C. Salop recommends that the next presidential administration continue to focus competition policy on protecting against adverse labor market outcomes. He suggests several policies the administration might pursue to achieve these benefits.| ProMarket
Critics of the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit last week to block the Kroger-Albertsons merger claim that the agency incorrectly limits the relevant buyer-side market to unionized grocery workers. Steve C. Salop argues that the critics are wrong, and that standard antitrust analysis shows the FTC has it right.| ProMarket
Business and economic thought instituted at least since the Reagan revolution in the United States have promoted firms’ narrowly self-interested, profit-maximizing conduct even at the expense of consumers and workers. This paradigm leads to social distrust and insufficient cooperation. Steven C. Salop explains this distortion and proposes 10 guidelines by which firms can self-moderate their behavior to produce prosocial outcomes.| ProMarket
Steven C. Salop evaluates the final version of the 2023 Merger Guidelines on vertical merger analysis and certain rebuttal arguments. He finds that the final Guidelines successfully incorporate developments in the economic scholarship and update antitrust enforcement with the tools to analyze non-horizontal mergers in an increasingly digital economy.| ProMarket
Book Reviews | ProMarket
Antitrust and Competition | ProMarket
South Korea’s proposed Online Platform Regulation Act has taken multiple turns amid political upheaval, pressure from the United States, and a fiercely competitive domestic tech market. Hwang Lee explores how global geopolitics, strong domestic platforms, and the "Brussels Effect" are reshaping the country’s approach to digital regulation.| ProMarket
Gary Kalman writes that actions under the second Trump administration to dismantle recent anti-corruption initiatives, including those pioneered during the first Trump administration, will cost dearly the American and global economy and enable many of the nefarious actors President Trump has publicly admonished.| ProMarket
Corporations can sidestep prosecution by cooperating with the government and offering up employees to avoid their own criminal liability. Ellen S. Podgor discusses two prominent reasons why the current approach to corporate criminality is inefficient.| ProMarket
Commentary | ProMarket
Over the past four years, antitrust scrutiny has increasingly focused on large technology firms. Ginger Zhe Jin and Liad Wagman discuss the complexities of antitrust enforcement and policy in the digital age, highlighting the challenges of promoting innovation while fostering competition, and areas where consumer protection and antitrust are colliding or are set to collide. To that end, the authors identify several key questions that the next administration of the United States should address...| ProMarket
What Prevents Local Governments From Managing Their Finances More Effectively?| ProMarket
Giovanna Massarotto writes that antitrust actions against major technology companies like AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft over the past century, though imperfect, have positively impacted innovation and competition in the computer industry by restricting anticompetitive behavior while allowing breakthrough technologies to flourish through carefully crafted remedies. This stands in contrast with Europe, which has seen less homegrown innovation from its technology companies.| ProMarket
The Political Economy of Populism in Mexico| ProMarket
The following is an excerpt from "Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America" by Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta, now out at Princeton University Press.| ProMarket
Anat R. Admati reviews Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal (2024) by Melissa B. Jacoby.| ProMarket
In new research, Axel Gottfries and Gregor Jarosch develop a model to understand how wage-fixing cartels operate and show how to gauge the harm they cause to workers.| ProMarket
The abundance movement, which seeks to lift the burden of inefficient regulation off the private sector to unleash equitable growth, has become the policy platform for many liberals. Dylan Gyauch-Lewis argues that the movement fails to account for the costs of externalities that many of the regulations it derides seek to address.| ProMarket
Judge Amit Mehta will shortly provide his remedy to Google’s monopoly in internet search. Fiona Scott Morton and Paul Heidhues argue that the remedy must include a cap on Google’s payments to the mobile phone manufacturers, carriers, and web browsers that propelled its monopoly. Because any outright ban risks harming Google’s current partners in the short term, Judge Mehta should consider pursuing a flexible ban that instead limits the revenue these partners can receive from Google in o...| ProMarket
The second Affiliate Fellows cohort at the Stigler Center at Chicago Booth is a multidisciplinary group of economists, business scholars, lawyers, and political scientists.| ProMarket
Antitrust and Competition | ProMarket
Mark MacCarthy writes that the case law supports Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson’s charge that collaboration by social media companies on content moderation practices would be anticompetitive collusion. However, the author argues that open and transparent cooperation might actually benefit a troubled internet, and Congress should consider carving out a content-neutral antitrust exemption for platforms in the way it has in the past for broadcast networks.| ProMarket
Commentary | ProMarket
Andrey Mir writes that antitrust scholarship and enforcement seeking to break up platform monopolies overlook the benefits that these platforms provide because they are monopolies. He says the community must keep this in mind as it seeks to alleviate harms that any monopoly incurs to the economy.| ProMarket
Johannes Fritz and Tommaso Giardini examine the state of AI rulemaking around the world and find that, despite global alignment on principles, execution at the national level diverges on three important metrics. The risk is fragmentation in AI as firms choose to exclude entire markets rather than navigate the intricacies of compliance in different regions.| ProMarket
Antitrust and Competition | ProMarket
Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York reflects on the history of cryptocurrency and his experience adjudicating criminal cases involving it.| ProMarket
Stigler Center Assistant Director Matt Lucky reviews Kenneth Rogoff’s new book, Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead, which reflects on the rise and ongoing fall of the American dollar’s global dominance. Rogoff discusses his book with Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales on this week’s Capitalisn’t episode, which you can listen to here.| ProMarket
Filippo Lancieri is an Associate Professor of Law at Georgetown University, a Research Fellow at the Stigler Center, and a Research Associate at the ETH Zurich Center for Law & Economics. Filippo’s research focuses on understanding how governments shape markets and, in turn, how markets shape governments. He mainly covers two connected areas. The first is antitrust and regulatory policy, emphasizing the political, economic, and legal determinants of enforcement actions and regulatory change...| ProMarket
John M. Barrios is an Assistant Professor of Accounting at the Washington University in St Louis, Olin School of Business. John M. Barrios’ general research interests focus on the intersection of labor economics and financial and managerial accounting. Specifically, his research has examined the areas of human capital, financial reporting, regulation, managerial incentives, and corporate governance. In addition to his research he has experience as an economic analyst for a political strateg...| ProMarket
Steven C. Salop argues that as part of any remedy outcome from the Google Search case, Google cannot be permitted to enter agreements with web browser operators such as Apple to share ad revenue from online searches, even without the condition of setting Google Search as the default choice. To do so would continue to […]| ProMarket
In recent weeks, a spate of mergers has been announced in telecommunications markets. The activity endangers Americans’ access to affordable and reliable internet services. Rather than continue to depend on private companies to provide essential internet services, cities should look to the many communities that have provided significantly lower-cost and higher-quality public internet connectivity, writes Sean Gonsalves.| ProMarket
As India contemplates adopting its Digital Competition Bill, Amber Darr and Madhavi Singh examine lessons from the European Union’s and United Kingdom’s legislative forays into digital markets. They argue that India must rethink its reliance on formal long-form enforcement and invest in regulatory capacity if it hopes to deliver an ex ante regime for a fair and contestable digital economy.| ProMarket
Christina M. Sautter writes that the passage of Senate Bill 21, which rebalances power away from shareholders to corporate management, represents a 150-year-long development in corporate law spurred by regulatory capture that has removed countless restrictions on firm behavior.| ProMarket
In a new NBER working paper, John M. Barrios, Filippo Lancieri, Joshua Levy, Shashank Singh, Tommaso Valletti, and Luigi Zingales explore the impact of various conflicts of interest on readers’ trust in academic research findings, uncovering significant nuances and implications for academia and policy. Trust in academic research is crucial as academia shapes policies, informs […]| ProMarket
In the 1930s, staffers at the newly established Federal Communications Commission devised a novel rationale for limiting network power in radio, telephony, and the press. While much has changed since the “age of radio,” the concerns they raised inform the present-day debate over the control that social media platforms exert over public discourse, writes Richard R. John.| ProMarket
Karina Montoya reflects on the end of the remedies phase of the Department of Justice’s case against Google for monopolizing the online search market. She argues that Google’s warnings against divestiture of its browser, Chrome, fall short and that a breakup will benefit the security of the internet, innovation, and users.| ProMarket
David Chan Smith argues that tariff regimes during the eighteenth century encouraged modern history’s first offshore markets to reroute goods through jurisdictions that faced lower tariff rates. This historical “entrepôt trade” could outstrip the legal trade of some goods and carries lessons for contemporary revisions to international trade.| ProMarket
Steven Salop is a Professor of Economics and Law at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC, where he teaches antitrust law and economics. His research and consulting focuses on antitrust, competition, and regulation. He has written numerous articles in various areas of antitrust and competition which take a modern “Post-Chicago” approach. These include a number of articles with various co-authors on the competitive effects of vertical mergers. Professor Salop has also writ...| ProMarket
Andrew Gavil examines the Biden Administration's antitrust policy, placing it in the broader historical context of evolving competition law. He questions the fit of Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shift for antitrust policy and argues instead that Biden's initiatives reflect the unique demands of the digital economy and the true nature of antitrust, which is ever evolving.| ProMarket
Big Tech’s monopoly over online discourse threatens democracy. “Middleware” promises a path forward by adding competitive, customizable layers of recommendation algorithms. But can middleware decentralize social media without falling prey to old monopolistic patterns? In new research, Madhavi Singh argues that without targeted regulatory guardrails—including mandatory API access, structural separation, and stakeholder empowerment—even middleware could […]| ProMarket
The following is the second part to the transcript of Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson’s keynote at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference. Part II includes Ferguson’s interview with University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner and the subsequent audience Q&A. You can read part I, Ferguson’s speech, here. Eric Posner Thank […]| ProMarket
Media pluralism is a core democratic value in Europe. Upholding it requires that media concentration is scrutinized beyond its impact on competition in the traditional economic formulation. By addressing the challenges posed by dominant media players and fostering a diverse information ecosystem, Europe aims to uphold media plurality as a democratic value and ensure that citizens can engage in informed decision-making. From this angle, the European approach to protecting media pluralism might...| ProMarket
Ula Furgal and Magali Eben review the United Kingdom’s efforts to address the lopsided balance of power between traditional news media and digital platforms, embodied in the Cairncross recommendations and subsequent Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act. Although U.K. news media have met the Act with optimism, there remain reasons why the new payment and […]| ProMarket
Melissa Newham reviews how investors can alter the incentives and behavior of pharmaceutical companies to reduce competition and consumer welfare through common ownership and “rollup” deals.| ProMarket
Populist leaders like United States President Donald Trump are zealously challenging the authority of independent technocrats and judges. This backlash follows decades of steadily increasing delegation of policymaking authority to unelected experts, bureaucratic agencies, and the judiciary. In new research, Gabriele Gratton and Jacob Edenhofer argue that such backlash is a predictable development in political environments where majorities are unstable and new political coalitions frequently f...| ProMarket
Over the last year, the United States government has demonstrated increased concern about private equity’s involvement in health care. Barak Richman and Richard Scheffler discuss why the government’s actions have not yet matched the energy of its words and how academics and policymakers must continue to investigate private equity’s influences as they devise policy to […]| ProMarket
In the wake of Democrats’ losses in 2024, progressives should focus on how antitrust can support a lower cost of living and increase consumer access to essential goods and services, writes Diana Moss.| ProMarket
Lucian Bebchuk and Robert Jackson discuss how Tesla is failing to bolster director independence despite a highly critical court opinion.| ProMarket
Lucian Bebchuk and Robert Jackson argue that Tesla’s proposal to ratify Elon Musk’s $50 billion pay package would fail to secure Musk’s devotion of time and effort to Tesla rather than other endeavors, just as its past pay arrangement did.| ProMarket
The concentration of news media has spurred concerns about their ability to protect the marketplace of ideas integral to the functioning of democracy. Based on new research, Marcel Garz and Mart Ots discuss why media consolidation may not lead to lower journalistic quality but still affects society through a decline in local news and original content.| ProMarket
The following is a transcript of Randy Picker's conversation with Tim Wu on how antitrust shaped competition and innovation in computers and chips, held at the 2024 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference.| ProMarket
The following is a transcript of Eric Posner and Carl Shapiro's debate on the proper role of economics in merger review at the 2024 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference.| ProMarket
The following is a transcript of Guy Rolnik's conversation with Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter and Chair Lina Khan at the 2024 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference.| ProMarket
The following is a transcript of Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Roger Alford and former Principle Deputy Assistant Attorney Doha Mekki in conversation with Bloomberg reporter Josh Sisco.| ProMarket
Herbert Hovenkamp writes that the court presiding over the Google Ad Tech case gave the government an important win. However, by relying on the per se tying rule instead of rule of reason, the court perpetuated a flawed court precedent that can preclude serious market analysis for competitive harms.| ProMarket
The Federal Trade Commission’s case against Meta for monopolizing personal social media through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp serves as a warning of allowing Big Tech companies to acquire nascent competitors in the artificial intelligence market through quasi-mergers that dodge government scrutiny. Based on new research, Alexandros Kazimirov argues that antitrust agencies can look at a combination of circumstantial evidence, including market product proximity, price premiums an...| ProMarket
