The Role of the State

In new research, Petros Boulieris, Bruno Carballa-Smichowski, Maria Niki Fourka and Ioannis Lianos analyze industrial policy from around the world to understand how policymakers are rethinking policy goals. The authors create a set of metrics to measure how different policy orientations improve or sacrifice competition.

Eleanor Fox argues that the leading law firms should have immediately and collectively resisted President Donald Trump’s attacks. Strong, timely collective resistance may have helped staunch democratic backsliding and prevented normalization of repeated, speech-chilling demands. Doing so, however, the firms would have faced the risk of violating the antitrust laws. This article assesses antitrust’s treatment of political action and argues that the space for protected political action needs to be enlarged.

Congress is considering eliminating the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the independent federal agency that “audits the auditors.” Karthik Ramanna and Nemit Shroff write...

Joseph Price writes that how the court in the Meta antitrust case determines the relevant product market may have implications for merger activity among television broadcasters, who have similarly argued that the regulators and courts use outdated market definitions to block consolidation.

The artificial intelligence market is rapidly developing but antitrust regulators are failing to update their policies, write Tennessee Attorney General and Reporter Jonathan Skrmetti and Kevin Frazier. Regulators’ passiveness risks repeating what happened to social media markets, where a few tech giants were able to acquire nascent competitors and dominate the market. The authors propose three policies to help maintain a competitive AI market.

Anthony T. LoSasso, Ge Bai, and Lawton Robert Burns argue that critics of private equity’s involvement in healthcare ignore that it is often the only financial lifeline available to distressed healthcare providers and can introduce an improvement in outcomes, including quality of care.

Theodosia Stavroulaki reviews how the involvement of private equity in American healthcare leads to, among other negative outcomes, burnout and stress among healthcare workers, particularly physicians. She writes that the consequences could cripple America’s healthcare system.

Recent government wins against Big Tech demonstrate the prudence of proactively stopping consolidation in the emerging AI startup ecosystem to prevent harm to innovation and consumers. OpenAI’s recent acquisition of Windsurf raises these competition concerns. The antitrust agencies should block it.

Robert I. Field argues that private equity’s impact on price competition among nursing homes is limited because prices are mostly determined by Medicaid. However, private equity does impact quality and labor outcomes, which deserve greater government scrutiny.

Brent Fulton discusses private equity’s investments in hospitals and assesses the risks it presents to key stakeholders: private equity investors, debt investors, patients, and the government. He argues financial transparency regulation is needed so fraudulent transfer and bankruptcy laws can be enforced to reduce uncompensated risk being borne by patients and the government (ultimately taxpayers).