Sandeep Vaheesan
Sandeep Vaheesan is the legal director at the Open Markets Institute. He previously served as a regulations counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he helped develop and draft the first comprehensive federal rule on payday, vehicle title, and high-cost installment loans.
Antitrust and Competition
Antitrust Law’s Unwritten Rules of Unfair Competition
Does the Sherman Act actually “protect competition, not competitors”? An examination of the case law reveals a more nuanced picture, in which...
Antitrust and Competition
Much of Antitrust Law Today Is Based on Unsupported or Demonstrably False Economic Theories. Will Economists Take Heed?
Many of the economic assumptions of contemporary antitrust law are unsupported or false, as the executive branch and judiciary have remade the...
Antitrust and Competition
Antitrust’s Monopsony Problem
Four cases from the past decade alleging employer collusion against workers show that at present, antitrust law is ill-equipped to protect workers. A root...
Antitrust and Competition
How Robert Bork Fathered the New Gilded Age
Much like in the first Gilded Age, antitrust enforcers today are hitting labor, not capital. This is thanks to Robert Bork’s radical and influential...
Antitrust and Competition
How the FTC Protects Strong Employers and Targets Weak Workers
Since the 1970s, the US has seen a growing power imbalance between workers and employers. This story was not inevitable, but the product of...
Latest news
Antitrust and 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.
Book Reviews
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.
Income Inequality
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.
ESG, Corporate Governance & Future of the Firm
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.
Antitrust and Competition
The Kroger-Albertsons Merger Will Not Help Grocery Competition
Kroger and Albertsons say they need to merge to compete with Walmart. Claire Kelloway argues that what they really want is Walmart’s monopsony power, and permitting mergers on these grounds will only harm suppliers, workers, and consumers.
Research
Innovators Respond to Their Presidential Candidate Winning With More Innovation
Does an inventor’s political identity influence their productivity? In a new paper, Joseph Engelberg, Runjing Lu, William Mullins, and Richard Townsend examine the impacts of the 2008 and 2016 United States presidential elections on Democrat and Republican inventors, with a particular focus on the quantity and quality of patents after the country elects a new president.
Antitrust and Competition
Letter to the Editor: Former FTC and DOJ Chief Economists Urge Separation of Economic and Legal Analysis in Merger Guidelines
Seventeen former chief economists of the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division urge current Agency heads to separate the legal and economic analysis in the draft Merger Guidelines to strengthen the role of the latter in merger review.
