News

In new research, Mario Amore, Morten Bennedsen, Birthe Larsen, and Zeyu Zhao examine the symbiotic relationship between working environments and employee well-being, finding that when workers are safe and satisfied, companies profit.

Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater recently gave a speech repudiating the laissez-faire antitrust enforcement policy of past administrations. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has ordered antitrust agencies to investigate how price-fixing has raised food prices. If the administration is serious about bringing food prices down for Americans, it should begin by addressing the costs farmers face. For that reason, Slater should investigate and possibly challenge the mergers between large seed sellers that occurred during Trump’s first term in office, writes Peter Carstensen.

In new research, Pinelopi Goldberg and Michele Ruta analyze how today’s structural, policy, and geopolitical trade conditions are no longer conducive to the trade-led growth miracles many developing countries experienced in the past.

In March, the Stigler Center will welcome nine world-class journalists from the United Kingdom, United States, South Korea, Uganda, Guyana, Belgium, and Turkey for an intensive 12-week program of professional development at Chicago Booth.

The following is an adapted excerpt from “To Protect Their Interests: The Invention and Exploitation of Corporate Bankruptcy" by Stephen J. Lubben, now out at Columbia University Press. 

Alexandros Kazimirov discusses how Nvidia’s quasi-merger with Groq resembles a familiar pattern of regulatory evasion that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have adopted with emerging artificial intelligence companies. He notes that his proposed remedy that was available to antitrust enforcers in the large language model market is not applicable to chip manufacturers like Nvidia.

Mihir Kshirsagar argues that the evidence presented in FTC v. Meta shows that discussions about the application of First Amendment protections to social media must go beyond the binary set in Moody v. NetChoice between treating them as common carriers or editorial agents. Rather, a commercial conduct framework is needed to understand how speech operates on platforms designed to maximize user attention and ad revenue.

In recent research, Christian Bergqvist argues that the European Union’s approach to wage-fixing, no-hire, and no-poach agreements reveals a lack of nuance that may end up harming competition.

In new research, Dragan Filimonovic, Christian Rutzer, and Conny Wunsch find that generative artificial intelligence not only enhances the productivity of scientific researchers, but also lowers barriers to entry for early-career scholars and scholars who are not fluent in English. Rather than attempting to prohibit GenAI’s use, institutions should develop disclosure guidelines to facilitate trust and support adoption.

In new research, Muxin Li and Ksenia Shakhgildyan examine the 2018 “brand gating” agreement between Apple and Amazon and how it impacted competition and consumer welfare on Amazon’s platform.