News

In new research in collaboration with Color of Change, Dante Donati and Lena Song find that comments on social media posts help drive platform engagement for organizations. However, comment sections are often populated by a vocal minority, and adversarial comments from them come with reduced off-platform support for the original posters.

In new research, Joel Dodge and Ganesh Sitaraman argue that a comprehensive industrial policy to secure American supply chains and ensure access to essential goods should incorporate the deployment of public factories.

Artificial intelligence coding agents provide enormous value to consumers for very low fees. But the market is quickly shrinking with Anthropic in the lead. Only competition, and requiring Big Tech to build agents rather than buy them, will continue to let AI’s value flow to consumers. As such, the courts should ban SpaceX’s recently proposed acquisition of Cursor, writes Ketan Ahuja.

In new research, Michele Fioretti and Alessandro Iaria discuss how a landmark Norwegian court ruling shows how constitutional constraints on the government’s ability to retroactively change contracts can encourage private innovation and reshape entire industries.

In new research, Marco Battaglini, Valerio Leone Sciabolazza, Mengwei Lin and Eleonora Patacchini study how the deaths of large donors change candidates’ electoral results and congressional activity in a new measure of donors’ influence in American politics.

Victor Jiawei Zhang revisits the 2025 United States ban on TikTok and explores how it represented a case study of how the government led users to act collectively to override network effects and introduce competition to the digital market. The case study highlights research from his new article, “Digital Antitrust Collectivism,” where he explores the possibility that users’ collective power can invigorate digital market competition.

The recent, blustery movements in oil prices in response to the United States’ war with Iran illustrate the financial market’s agile ability to reprice for a predicted future market. Yet, a decade after 195 nations adopted the Paris Agreement to transition away from fossil fuels, the market has made no changes in response. Part of this may be due to investors’ expectations of a delayed rollout, but the inertia is also due to flawed market design in which laws of fiduciary duty prevent funds from providing investors with vehicles that can make true bets on how soon the world will retire fossil fuels, writes Michael A. Santoro.

Americans’ retirement savings are disproportionately tied to the dozen Big Tech firms that now dominate the S&P. This makes any intervention into regulating Big Tech that risks devaluing them politically difficult, writes Hera Hyeonseo Lee.

Across three studies, Jana Friedrichsen, Julia Schwarz, and Michel Clement explore how generative AI will change the music industry. They find that while consumers enjoy and even prefer AI-generated music, preferences shift upon learning that the song was AI-generated.

American communities have begun to reject the construction of local data centers out of concern that they drive up electricity prices without returning durable and diversified job and other economic benefits. Jake Higdon writes that governments concerned about these risks should not only insulate consumers from higher prices, but also demand that data center investments be used to power reindustrialization efforts.