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In new research, Xiao Dong, Paul Koh, Devesh Raval, Dominic Smith, and Brett Wendling evaluate how well divestiture remedies work for mergers in the supermarket industry. They find that past supermarket divestitures lead to lower employment, reduced sales, and higher rates of exit from the market relative to comparable non-divested supermarkets.  

In a new working paper, Magnus Lodefalk, Lydia Löthman, Michael Koch, and Erik Engberg examine how generative AI is reshaping the labor market. They find little evidence that AI has cut the total number of jobs, but show that it has slowed hiring for the youngest workers, especially in the AI-exposed occupations where young women are concentrated. Over time, AI’s effect on entry-level roles risks thinning the next generation’s ability to build the skills and networks that careers are made of. 

2026 marks the fiftieth anniversary of University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Michael D Bordo reflects on how Milton Friedman’s legacy has developed in this time. While Friedman’s revolutionary idea of monetarism has been superseded in some ways, his contributions have played a key role in the evolution of monetary policy and remain critical to contemporary macroeconomic research and central bank policy.

The European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines assign multiple meanings to several key terms, making competition enforcement less predictable. Anouk van der Veer, Max van Iersel, and Giorgio Monti explore the Guideline’s inconsistent use of three of these terms: competitiveness, dynamic, and capabilities.

The European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines consider import competition from foreign rivals to be a powerful competitive constraint on domestic producers, thus easing clearance for mergers between those domestic competitors. This stipulation ignores how a merger between domestic rivals can lead to subsequent trade barriers, writes Felix Montag.

The Affiliate Fellows cohort at the Stigler Center at Chicago Booth is a multidisciplinary group of economists, business scholars, lawyers, and political scientists.

Change is the core theme of the European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines, which seek to embed flexibility into merger assessment to account for the...

Although the European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines acknowledge that consolidation in digital platforms can harm the democratic process, they need to up their efforts to protect media competition and a quality public sphere. Vicky Robertson provides three steps to rectify this oversight.

The European Commission draft merger guidelines reorient merger analysis to focus on “capabilities”: how firms compete in current markets and pivot to future ones. However, the guidelines combine “capabilities” with what strategic management scholars call “resources.” This erroneous amalgamation oversimplifies merger assessment and risks inaccurate analysis, writes Selcukhan Unekbas.

The European Commission’s draft merger Guidelines adopt the advice of the Draghi report on European Union competitiveness to tailor competition law to promote goals that have traditionally fallen under industrial, trade, and national security policy. Conceptual ambiguity and the convergence of these policy areas risk undermining consumer welfare, entrenching incumbents, and opening regulation to business capture, write Annika Stöhr and Oliver Budzinski.