News

For the first time in decades, the Department of Justice filed suit against an airline merger—and won. William McGee argues that the next fight is correcting false assertions concerning JetBlue and Spirit for the sake of future potential mergers, such as one between Alaskan and Hawaiian Airlines.

Most of the scholarship on private enforcement, in which individual citizens sue to enforce legal statutes, has focused on federal-level laws. In new research, Diego A. Zambrano, Neel Guha, Austin Peters, and Jeffrey Xia show how expansive and messy state-level private enforcement statutes are, and explain why previous theories on private enforcement do not explain the dynamic among the states. They conclude that research on state-level private enforcement demands much more attention than previously provided.

Tommaso Valletti argues that economic consultants have made little meaningful contribution to antitrust policy and enforcement over the past 20 years—despite their assertions of bringing academic insights to practice. Valletti calls for more critical scrutiny of consultants' biased economic analyses by antitrust authorities and courts, as well as greater use of structural presumptions in merger review.

In a new paper, Ilyana Kuziemko, Nicolas Longuet-Marx, and Suresh Naidu point to a shift in the Democratic Party’s economic policy, from predistribution to redistribution, as one of the reasons why it has lost less-educated voters.

How can investors use capital markets to encourage emissions reductions? In new research, Matthew E. Kahn, John G. Matsusaka, and Chong Shu examine whether public pension funds are more effective in mitigating pollution when they divest from fossil fuel companies or actively engage their management.

In new research, Elise Blasingame, Christina Boyd, Roberto Carlos, and Joseph Ornstein explore how the Trump administration used a quota policy for immigration judges working under the Department of Justice's purview to influence how they adjudicated cases. The authors find the policy successfully nudged more judges to rule against immigrant plaintiffs.

The following is an excerpt from Kyle Edward Williams' new book, "Taming the Octopus: The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation," now out at W. W. Norton & Company.

Christian Bergqvist has identified 100-plus antitrust cases against Google spanning 23 jurisdictions and classifies them by the service in question and its alleged harms. Most of these fall within eight groups. Bergqvist’s analysis provides a picture of recent shifts in antitrust enforcers’ regulation of Big Tech and the potentially transformative consequences for Google and the entire tech industry.

A federal judge recently blocked the proposed merger of JetBlue and Spirit airlines on antitrust grounds, reversing antitrust enforcers’ recent history of waving through airline industry consolidation. However, while this decision affirms that mergers designed to reduce competition and raise prices violate antitrust law, it comes too late to undo the damage from 15 years of lax enforcement that allowed radical consolidation in the airline industry.

Why has antitrust enforcement declined in the United States since the 1970s? Is it due to the preferences of voters, business influence, or an alternative explanation altogether? In this symposium, Jonathan Baker, Eleanor Fox, and Herbert Hovenkamp discuss the findings of Filippo Lancieri, Eric Posner, and Luigi Zingales’ new paper, “The Political Economy of the Decline of Antitrust Enforcement in the United States.” In this article, Posner responds to the discussants' critiques and comments.