News

In new research, Ramona Dagostino and Anya Nakhmurina discuss how political misalignment between state governors and city leadership can affect how cities access financing, particularly in municipal bond pricing and crisis prevention investment.

Live Nation-Ticketmaster has filed a motion for summary judgment to persuade the judge presiding over the antitrust lawsuit against the company that the government has not turned up enough evidence of wrongdoing or harm to consumers. Diana L. Moss refutes the motion’s main arguments and defends the government’s lawsuit.

In new research, Riley Acton, Emily Cook, and Paola Ugalde find that college campuses in the United States have become increasingly polarized over the last few decades, and both liberals and conservatives are willing to pay much more to attend colleges with likeminded peers.

Nancy L. Rose and Jonathan Sallet respond to a recent article by Herbert Hovenkamp, in which he argues that the merger-efficiencies defense, which requires merging parties to demonstrate competitive benefits of a merger in order to rebut a prima facie case of harm presented by plaintiffs, is too burdensome and runs contrary to empirical evidence.

Summary Teaser: In a new working paper, Jakob Beuschlein, Jósef Sigurdsson, and Horng Chern Wong find that workers at acquired firms in Sweden experience wage cuts. Rather than from the increased monopsony power of employers, these wage cuts are due to rent redistribution toward higher CEO pay.

The following is an excerpt from “The Division of Rationalized Labor” by Michelle Jackson, now out at Harvard University Press. 

Matt Lucky reviews two new books exploring why digital platforms are failing users and how to rediscover the internet’s original promises of an abundance of high-quality and cheap services: Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It and Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.

In the second of two articles, Jeff Alvares analyzes the competing arguments around Pix under World Trade Organization rules—a debate involving broader questions about how international trade rules need to reflect the complexity of public services in the digital economy.

In the first of two articles, Jeff Alvares explores how Brazil’s public digital payments system achieved transformative financial inclusion through vertically integrated infrastructure, creating a model now facing scrutiny under international trade law and raising questions about the boundaries of legitimate public infrastructure provision.

In new research, Norman Bishara and Lorenzo Luisetto analyze the nature and proliferation of state legislative activity to regulate noncompete agreements since 2009. In the absence of a federal rule, these developments represent a promising step toward curbing the abuse of noncompete agreements.