The United States healthcare system has experienced an expansion of private equity ownership. In new research, Theodosia Stavroulaki argues that private equity acquisitions risk harming healthcare by increasing prices, reducing quality of care, limiting access to care, and hurting the labor force.

Investors have poured billions into using artificial intelligence to discover new drugs, and 2026 is the first real test of whether AI-designed medicines actually helps patients. The boom has genuinely transformed the search for molecules — but that was never the costly, failure-prone part of making a medicine, and there AI has so far had little to add. Capital, and the public subsidies have not yet priced the difference, writes Michael A. Santoro.

In February, the Federal Trade Commission settled with pharmaceutical benefits manager (PBM) Express Scripts. The FTC had sued Express Scripts and two other large PBMs under the long dormant Section 5 of the FTC Act, which targets “unfair methods of competition.” The settlement suggests that the FTC may succeed in addressing the convoluted contracts between PBMs, drug manufacturers, health insurers, and employers that drive up drug prices for Americans. It also opens unchartered territory for antitrust enforcement and the limits of Section 5, argue Fiona Scott Morton and Mariah Smith.

In new research, Renuka Diwan, Paul Eliason, Riley League, Ryan C. McDevitt, James W. Roberts, and Jetson Leder-Luis investigate how Medicare’s shift to a competitive bidding system to reduce prices has inadvertently shifted market share to fraudulent suppliers.

In a new paper, Joseph Emmens, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, Stefano Manfredonia, Felix Noth, and Tommaso Santini find that when competitors for the same pool of workers share investors, they increase their innovation to automate tasks and slow down hiring.    

In new research for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, David M. Primo uses campaign contribution data to show that professors at leading universities are more politically active than the average American and skew heavily to the left politically, raising concerns about the diversity of perspectives on college campuses.    

Supporters of more robust antitrust policy have pointed to the subsequent success of Figma after authorities blocked Adobe’s acquisition of it. Skeptics, including venture capitalists, have argued that the one case reveals nothing systematic about the benefits of stronger merger review. Venture capitalists happen to be the one party with the data and resources to fund the studies to show any systematic correlation one way or the other. They should do so, writes Shishene Jing.

The revived American Innovation Choice Online Act singles out a handful of Big Tech giants for unique, antitrust-like restrictions, but without the standard methodological...