Hal Singer

Hal Singer is a managing director of Econ One and an adjunct professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. He is also the co-author of the e-book The Need for Speed: A New Framework for Telecommunications Policy for the 21st Century (Brookings Press 2013), and co-author of the book Broadband in Europe: How Brussels Can Wire the Information Society (Kluwer/Springer Press 2005). He is a recipient of the 2018 Antitrust Enforcement Award from the American Antitrust Institute for his work In Re Lidoderm Antitrust Litigation.

Neoliberal Economists Are Giving Biden Bad Advice on Inflation

To spare the economy from the pain of further interest rate hikes, the President should aggressively pursue anticompetitive conduct by companies in...

Missing the Forest for the Trees: A Reply to Hovenkamp and Shapiro

The Federal Trade Commission’s now-abandoned 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines were not some ideal economic document that the FTC foolishly disregarded; rather, they...

Beefing Up Merger Enforcement by Banning Merger Remedies

The unraveling of the T-Mobile/Sprint remedy continues a trend of failed merger consent decrees. One solution, proposed by two antitrust scholars, is...

Rep. Cicilline’s Nondiscrimination Bill Would Offer a Lifeline to Independent App Developers

Contrary to the naysayers, the American Choice and Innovation Online Act won’t result in naked iPhones or iPhones cluttered with hundreds of...

Fixing a Broken Antitrust Regime

In her new book Antitrust, Senator Amy Klobuchar explains the origins of US antitrust law, diagnoses how the nation got derailed from...

Congress Is Leaning Towards a Big Tech Breakup

The dominant platforms have proven themselves to be ungovernable. Behavioral remedies, especially those that require continuous oversight, might be pushed aside. The...

There Are Lots of Competition Problems on the Internet. Parler’s Takedown Is Not One of Them.

Parler’s antitrust case against Amazon is doomed, and there is no basis for Congress to impose any special duties on Amazon to...

Facebook Could Be Heading Towards a Breakup

Assuming Facebook’s acquisitions can be shown to have eliminated emerging rivals, reversing those acquisitions via divestiture—“the most important of antitrust remedies”—is the...

The Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee Has Charted a Course for President-Elect Biden: He Should Follow It

Real antitrust reform of the kind offered by the Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee is needed to assist enforcers in precisely the types of...

Antitrust as Economic Stimulus

By attacking power imbalances, competition policy can steer income to workers and independent merchants who are more inclined to spend than monopoly...

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.