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Hosein Maleki, Mahsa Kaviani, Simi Kedia and Shaghayegh (Shay) Pourvosoughi

Women-Owned Firms Are Pushed to Liquidate During Bankruptcy

New research by Hosein Maleki, Mahsa Kaviani, Simi Kedia, and Shay Pourvosoughi shows that women-owned firms are less likely to get a second chance after filing for bankruptcy and that the gap between male- and female-owned firm filings widens when courts are overloaded.

COMMENTARY

The Pharmaceutical Benefits Manager Settlements Are a Novel Advance for the FTC and Competition Enforcement

Fiona Scott Morton and Mariah Smith
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.

RESEARCH

More AI-Exposed Industries and States Are Benefiting, But Results Are Heterogeneous

Christos Makridis and Andrew Johnston
In new research, Christos Makridis and Andrew Johnston find that industries exposed to generative AI are seeing an increase in production, employment, and wages. However, the majority of AI-driven revenue growth is channelled back to capital as profits, rather than to workers.
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Antitrust and Competition

How To Enforce the Robinson-Patman Act Without Reinventing Its Intent

Darren Tucker
The antitrust agencies’ revival of the Robinson-Patman Act risks undercutting legitimate business practices that benefit consumers. However, there is a role the Act can play in protecting small businesses, writes Darren Tucker.
Money in Politics

Why Big Business Loves Costly Regulations   

Luca Macedoni and Ariel Weinberger
In new research, Luca Macedoni and Ariel Weinberger argue that large firms are more likely to lobby in favor of strict industry regulations when they can reduce competition by imposing high fixed costs on smaller, less-profitable firms.
Populism

Populism Hurts Growth, Even When the Economy Looks Strong

Ido Baum, Leszek Balcerowicz, Jakub Karnowski and Andrzej Rzońca
In new research, Ido Baum, Leszek Balcerowicz, Jakub Karnowski and Andrzej Rzońca assess how Poland achieved economic growth with a populist government. They argue that the economic success is misleading and Poland’s leading party passed harmful policies that affect the country’s long-term growth opportunities. 
Big Tech

How a 2016 Accounting Rule Fueled Big Tech’s Investments in AI Startups

Hera Hyeonseo Lee
An accounting rule introduced by the Financial Accounting Standards Board in 2016 was designed to address a flaw in the previous regime that contributed to the 2008 Financial Crisis. However, this same rule is enabling the circuit of investments that flows from Big Tech companies to artificial intelligence startups, whose increased valuation from these investments increases the value of the Big Tech companies, which they can then reinvest in the AI startups. The risk is an AI bubble that, if it pops, will also blow up Americans’ savings, writes Hera Hyeonseo Lee.
Antitrust and Competition

The DMA’s Google Maps Experiment Shows That Competition Is Not One Click Away

Louis Pape and Michelangelo Rossi
In new research, Louis Pape and Michelangelo Rossi find that the European Union’s Digital Markets Act’s prohibition on self-preferencing had little effect on the popularity of Google Maps relative to competitors. User preference for the incumbent service appears to outweigh frictional barriers to access.
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READING LISTS

Health Care

Americans spend significantly more on health care than any other country. Why? Answers to this question range from hospital monopolies to perverse incentives to opaque pricing to medical licensing to pharmaceutical firms abusing IP practices to “creeping consolidation.” Why is the US health care system so broken? And what can antirust do about it? Catch-up on our coverage of antitrust and the US health care system.

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Health Care

How Competition Has Increased Fraud in Medicare’s DME Program

Renuka Diwan, Paul Eliason, Riley League, Ryan C. McDevitt and James W. Roberts
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.
Antitrust and Competition

Do Pharmaceutical Acquisitions Undermine Innovation by Disrupting Human Capital?

Carmine Ornaghi and Lorenzo Cassi
Antitrust authorities increasingly assess mergers through the lens of innovation, particularly in research-intensive sectors such as pharmaceuticals. In new research, Carmine Ornaghi and Lorenzo Cassi show how mergers disrupt human capital and reduce innovation in what they call manslaughter acquisitions.
Antitrust and Competition

Common Ownership May Reduce the Entry of Cheaper Generic Drugs

Martin Schmalz and Jin Xie
In new research, Martin Schmalz and Jin Xie examine how shareholder preferences influence the United States pharmaceutical industry. They find that generic-drug manufacturers sometimes harm their firms’ own value when doing so benefits shareholder portfolios, who frequently have stakes in competing brand-name firms.
Antitrust and Competition

Novo Nordisk’s Offer To Acquire Metsera Constitutes Attempted Monopolization

Hannah Pittock
Hannah Pittock uses weight-loss company Novo Nordisk’s offer to acquire Metsera to create a three-prong framework by which the antitrust agencies can identify when an invitation to exclude a rival from a market constitutes illegal exclusionary conduct under Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

George J. Stigler, one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1982 “for his seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets, and causes and effects of public regulation.” His research upended the idea that government regulation was effective at correcting private-market failures. Stigler introduced the idea of regulatory capture, in which regulators could be dominated by special interests. These regulators would work for the benefit of large, monied organizations rather than the public good. Catch up on ProMarket's coverage of his legacy.

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Big Tech

Opposing Comments Drive Organizations’ Social Media Engagement but Undermine Offline Goals

Dante Donati and Lena Song
In new research in collaboration with Color of Change, Dante Donati and Lena Song find that comments on social media posts help drive platform engagement for organizations. However, comment sections are often populated by a vocal minority, and adversarial comments from them come with reduced off-platform support for the original posters.
Industrial Policy

The Case for Public Factories

Joel Dodge and Ganesh Sitaraman
In new research, Joel Dodge and Ganesh Sitaraman argue that a comprehensive industrial policy to secure American supply chains and ensure access to essential goods should incorporate the deployment of public factories.
Antitrust and Competition

If Elon Musk Wants To Compete With Anthropic, He Should Build Rather Than Buy

Ketan Ahuja
Artificial intelligence coding agents provide enormous value to consumers for very low fees. But the market is quickly shrinking with Anthropic in the lead. Only competition, and requiring Big Tech to build agents rather than buy them, will continue to let AI’s value flow to consumers. As such, the courts should ban SpaceX’s recently proposed acquisition of Cursor, writes Ketan Ahuja.
Globalization

Innovation Suffers When Governments Can Alter Their Contracts

Michele Fioretti and Alessandro Iaria
In new research, Michele Fioretti and Alessandro Iaria discuss how a landmark Norwegian court ruling shows how constitutional constraints on the government’s ability to retroactively change contracts can encourage private innovation and reshape entire industries.

Large Donors’ Networks Matter More Than Their Dollar Contributions

Marco Battaglini, Valerio Leone Sciabolazza, Mengwei Lin and Eleonora Patacchini
In new research, Marco Battaglini, Valerio Leone Sciabolazza, Mengwei Lin and Eleonora Patacchini study how the deaths of large donors change candidates’ electoral results and congressional activity in a new measure of donors’ influence in American politics.

The TikTok Ban Was a Model for Digital Competition Policy

Victor Jiawei Zhang
Victor Jiawei Zhang revisits the 2025 United States ban on TikTok and explores how it represented a case study of how the government led users to act collectively to override network effects and introduce competition to the digital market. The case study highlights research from his new article, “Digital Antitrust Collectivism,” where he explores the possibility that users’ collective power can invigorate digital market competition.

If Markets Can Reprice for Hormuz, They Can Reprice for Paris

Michael Santoro
The recent, blustery movements in oil prices in response to the United States’ war with Iran illustrate the financial market’s agile ability to reprice for a predicted future market. Yet, a decade after 195 nations adopted the Paris Agreement to transition away from fossil fuels, the market has made no changes in response. Part of this may be due to investors’ expectations of a delayed rollout, but the inertia is also due to flawed market design in which laws of fiduciary duty prevent funds from providing investors with vehicles that can make true bets on how soon the world will retire fossil fuels, writes Michael A. Santoro.

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The publication of the Stigler Center at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

ProMarket is dedicated to discussing how competition tends to be subverted by special interests. The posts represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty. For more information, please visit ProMarket Policy.