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In a new working paper, Benjamin Verschuere and Angus Cameron argue that the wide dispersion in economists' forecasts for the impact of artificial intelligence on the economy stems from two gaps. The first is that estimates for growth, jobs, and prices are each built in isolation, with no single framework to reconcile them. The second is that models fixate on AI’s current capabilities, rather than on how fast it spreads and how much of a given job it can eventually reach. The authors build a unified framework that predicts roughly $2 trillion in long-run output gains, the loss of about 20 million American jobs, and falling prices.

The Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter strips independent agencies of removal protections that made regulatory policy predictable across administrations. In new research, Brian Feinstein and Daniel Hemel find that equity markets assign real value to precisely that kind of insulation.

In new research examining 44 million U.S. mortgages and nearly 5,000 bank mergers over three decades, Celso Brunetti, Jeffrey H. Harris, and Ioannis Spyridopoulos find that bank consolidation does not raise mortgage rates, restrict credit access, or degrade loan quality. Local mortgage markets remain intensely competitive. 

The European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines give a central role to dynamic competition in merger review. Some scholars have criticized dynamic competition as an analytical tool that seems to always discourage government intervention, given how quickly and unexpectedly—or dynamically—innovation can remake a market. Nicolas Petit, Selcukhan Unekbas, Bowman Heiden, and Pierre Regibeau argue this critique ignores the several large cases in which regulators used dynamic competition to intervene in a merger.

California’s proposed wealth tax on billionaires will struggle to accurately value and tax the wealth of California’s richest. Rather than fund the state’s massive budgetary commitments, the bill may drive away its largest taxpayers, write Ray Ball and Andrew Sutherland.

The United States healthcare system has experienced an expansion of private equity ownership. In new research, Theodosia Stavroulaki argues that private equity acquisitions risk harming healthcare by increasing prices, reducing quality of care, limiting access to care, and hurting the labor force.

Public investors poured funds into buying SpaceX shares upon its mid-June IPO, and they can be expected to continue to do so heavily over...

The draft EU Merger Guidelines open merger analysis to non-economic considerations, including choice, supply chain resilience, and sustainability. However, they do not yet explain how these considerations will be paired with a traditional consumer welfare analysis of price and quantity. Maciej Bernatt and Simbarashe Tavuyanago look to South Africa to devise a “vulnerable consumer test” that can help bridge these economic and non-economic goals.

Investors have poured billions into using artificial intelligence to discover new drugs, and 2026 is the first real test of whether AI-designed medicines actually helps patients. The boom has genuinely transformed the search for molecules — but that was never the costly, failure-prone part of making a medicine, and there AI has so far had little to add. Capital, and the public subsidies have not yet priced the difference, writes Michael A. Santoro.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s argument that businesses need to be able to easily switch between artificial intelligence models is correct but elides the fact,...