Eric A. Posner

Eric Posner is Kirkland and Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago. His research interests include financial regulation, antitrust law, and constitutional law. He has written a dozen books and more than a hundred academic articles on law and legal theory. His most recent books are How Antitrust Failed Workers (Oxford University Press, 2021), Radical Markets (Princeton) (with Glen Weyl), which was named a best book for 2018 by The Economist; Last Resort: The Financial Crisis and the Future of Bailouts (Chicago), which was named a best book for 2018 by The Financial Times; and The Twilight of Human Rights Law (Oxford). He is of counsel at MoloLamken LLP, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Law Institute.

Eric Posner: The Role of Consumer Welfare in Merger Enforcement

Eric Posner provides his round-two comments on the draft Merger Guidelines.

The Whig History of the Merger Guidelines

A pervasive "Whig" view of United States antitrust history among scholars and practitioners celebrates the Merger Guidelines' implementation of increasingly sophisticated economic methods since their...

Toward a Market Power Standard for Merger Review

The Stigler Center’s 2023 Antitrust and Competition conference seeks to answer the question: what lays beyond the consumer welfare standard? In advance...

Antitrust’s Labor Market Problem

A series of academic studies in recent years highlighted the fact that labor markets are often highly concentrated and that employers use...

Senator Klobuchar’s Antitrust Bill Doesn’t Go Far Enough

Senator Klobuchar’s bill includes many useful proposals to bolster antitrust enforcement, but the antitrust laws have been so weakened by the courts...

Why the FTC Should Focus on Labor Monopsony

Economic theory tells us that firms are more likely to exploit labor market power than product market power in the United States today. And...

Data Workers of the World, Unite!

With solutions to the threats of digital monopolies currently looking unlikely to come from the state, law and economics scholars Eric Posner and Glen...

Latest news

The Kroger-Albertsons Merger Threatens Smaller Upstream Suppliers

Much of the conversation of the proposed Kroger-Albertsons merger has focused on the risks to consumers. However, the merger also poses serious implications for the grocers’ upstream suppliers, particularly smaller regional firms.

Why Have Uninsured Depositors Become De Facto Insured?

Due to a change in how the FDIC resolves failed banks, uninsured deposits have become de facto insured. Not only is this dangerous for risk in the banking system, it is not what Congress intends the FDIC to do, writes Michael Ohlrogge.

Merger Law Reaches Acquirer Incentives and Private Equity Strategies

Steven C. Salop argues that Section 7 of the Clayton Act prohibits mergers in which the acquiring firm’s unilateral incentives and business strategy are likely to lessen market competition.

Tim Wu Responds to Letter by Former Agency Chief Economists

Former special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy Tim Wu responds to the November 27 letter signed by former chief economists at the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department Antitrust Division calling for a separation of the legal and economic analysis in the draft Merger Guidelines.

Can the Public Moderate Social Media?

ProMarket student editor Surya Gowda reviews the arguments made by Paul Gowder in his new book, The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms.

Uninhibited Campaign Donations Risks Creating Oligarchy

In new research, Valentino Larcinese and Alberto Parmigiani find that the 1986 Reagan tax cuts led to greater campaign spending from wealthy individuals, who benefited the most from this policy. The authors argue that a very permissive system of political finance, combined with the erosion of tax progressivity, created the conditions for the mutual reinforcement of economic and political disparities. The result was an inequality spiral hardly compatible with democratic ideals.

Did the Meme Stock Revolution Actually Change Anything?

Many financial commentators thought that the surge of retail investors participating in the stock market, the most notable of whom boosted “meme stocks” like GameStop, would democratize corporate governance and improve prosocial firm behavior, including the promotion of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. In new research, Dhruv Aggarwal, Albert H. Choi, and Yoon-Ho Alex Lee find evidence that the exact opposite took place.