The Role of the State

Gus Hurwitz explores the tenets of conservative antitrust under the second Trump administration and why it is unlikely to establish a lasting influence.

Thomas A. Lambert argues that the conservative antitrust program articulated by the antitrust enforcers of the Second Trump administration hardly resembles the conservative antitrust of previous decades. Its divergences will likely end up harming consumers.

Rebecca Haw Allensworth writes that the hallmark of the new conservative antitrust is not economic populism but silencing speech that the Trump administration ideologically opposes.

The European Commission has struggled to tackle excessive prices in Europe, despite evidence of how they arise in relation to market power. Aline Blankertz, Todd Davies, Justine Haekens, and Nicholas Shaxson argue that adopting accounting and financial analysis as part of its toolkit can enable the Commission to understand and act when firms are exploiting their market power.

Reed Showalter argues that the suggestion that antitrust can be ringfenced from democracy or the democratic process is erroneous. Antitrust is fundamentally a body...

Yunsieg P. Kim argues that economic regulation, including antitrust, can only be democratic if it is the choice of well-informed citizens. This article is part...

Erik Peinert explores the paradoxical relationship between economic concentration and democracy, where economic concentration compromises the democratic process and democratic backsliding also gains momentum by taking advantage of concentrated market actors, whose political power is now impotent, to capture civil society.

Sean Sullivan discusses the role public opinion should play in setting antitrust policy and what should be left to the expert economists.

Recent years have witnessed a significant wave of initiatives aimed at expanding antitrust’s substantive reach and reinvigorating enforcement, both to counter decades of weakened enforcement and to address contemporary economic realities. These efforts have coincided with calls to “democratize” antitrust by engaging the public in policymaking. Barak Orbach argues that such “democratized antitrust” is impractical, but boundary-pushing dynamics are central to the evolution of antitrust. He offers a conceptual guide for antitrust boundary pushing.

Gerhard Schick discusses the CumEx and CumCum share-trading scandals that cost German taxpayers billions of euros over the course of several decades and the failures in political and social institutions that allowed these scandals to persist for so long.