Research

Politicians often interfere with central banks, but it is not clear how to measure such political pressure systematically and therefore difficult to quantify its economic consequences. In new research, Thomas Drechsel finds that political pressure strongly and persistently raises inflation and inflation expectations but has little impact on economic activity.

Hao Zhang examines how global value chain partnerships among large, monopolistic firms in the US enable new forms of political coordination and coalition-building to influence trade policy in their favor, despite popular backlash against globalization.

In new research, Giovanna Massarotto explains how collusion manifests differently in the digital economy. She argues that antitrust regulators, scholars, and courts need to incorporate lessons from computer science to update how they monitor markets and identify algorithmic collusion.

In new research, Alma Cohen finds that the political affiliations of Circuit Court judges influence decisions in a much wider variety of cases than previously thought.

Stricter merger policy guidelines will increase competition, leading to higher wages and welfare for workers, writes Kyle Herkenhoff and Simon Mongey. The authors use economic modeling to show that the stricter 2023 Guidelines will improve worker welfare, and that even tighter thresholds can be applied to labor markets to amplify worker welfare gains from antitrust policy.

Academic writings on the optimal design of antitrust rules fail to pay sufficient attention to enforcement predictability as a relevant factor. In new research, Jan Broulík analyzes the various ways in which predictability is disregarded and their possible underlying reasons.

Madan Dhanora, Mohd Shadab Danish, and Ruchi Sharma review the history of the Indian government’s efforts to encourage innovation, how these efforts have manifested in the national pharmaceutical industry, and what steps the government can take to further improve innovation.

Recent antitrust interventions have put forward behaviorally informed theories of harm. However, they have adopted a deterministic model of behavior, missing the nuances that allow behavioral economics to provide a richer picture of people’s conduct. The recently concluded Google trial, grounded on the stickiness of defaults, is a good example. A more careful application of behavioral economics would have shown how Google’s purchase of default search engine status was a part of a broader monopolization plan. It would also show why the dominant remedy, forced choice, would have negligible effects.

In new research, Seong Jin Ahn, Jared N. Jennings, and Yanrong Jia find that SEC enforcement against insider trading does not deter subsequent insider trading so much as displace it to other actors in the same industry.

The United States has relaxed campaign finance laws over the past few decades. As a result, there exist concerns about politicians favoring special business interests over the welfare of other constituents, such as workers. In a new paper, Pat Akey, Tania Babina, Greg Buchak, and Ana-Maria Tenekedjieva examine how the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission affected earnings for firms and workers, as well as political turnover and polarization at the state level.