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John M. Barrios, Filippo Lancieri, Joshua Levy, Shashank Singh, Tommaso Valletti and Luigi Zingales

How Conflicts of Interest Shape Trust in Academic Work

In a new NBER working paper, John M. Barrios, Filippo Lancieri, Joshua Levy, Shashank Singh, Tommaso Valletti, and Luigi Zingales explore the impact of various conflicts of interest on readers' trust in academic research findings, uncovering significant nuances and implications for academia and policy. Trust in academic research is crucial as academia shapes policies, informs public debates, and guides important societal decisions. This trust, however, could be affected by the presence of conflicts of interest (CoIs), situations where a specific...

COMMENTARY

EU and US Antitrust Is Converging on Anti-Monopoly

Paul Friederiszick
There are many differences between European and American antitrust regulation, but recent enforcement against Big Tech shows that in the most important ways they are converging on an anti-monopoly philosophy, writes Paul Friederiszick.

RESEARCH

Data Suggests Not All Industrial Policy Sacrifices Competition by Design

Petros Boulieris, Bruno Carballa-Smichowski, Maria Niki Fourka and Ioannis Lianos
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.
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Antitrust and Competition

It’s Time To Imagine Chrome Without Google

Karina Montoya
Karina Montoya reflects on the end of the remedies phase of the Department of Justice’s case against Google for monopolizing the online search market. She argues that Google’s warnings against divestiture of its browser, Chrome, fall short and that a breakup will benefit the security of the internet, innovation, and users.
Commentary

A Tale of Tariffs and the Making of the Modern Offshore Market

David Chan Smith
David Chan Smith argues that tariff regimes during the eighteenth century encouraged modern history’s first offshore markets to reroute goods through jurisdictions that faced lower tariff rates. This historical “entrepôt trade” could outstrip the legal trade of some goods and carries lessons for contemporary revisions to international trade.
ESG, Corporate Governance & Future of the Firm

Is Nonprofit Ownership Really About Purpose?

Ofer Eldar and Mark Ørberg
Why is nonprofit ownership gaining traction in the U.S., with companies like OpenAI and Patagonia mirroring long-standing models in Europe, such as Novo Nordisk and IKEA? In new research, Ofer Eldar and Mark Ørberg unpack the economic rationales behind nonprofit business ownership, challenge the idea that it’s all about purpose, and highlight the overlooked risks of nonprofit control.
Antitrust and Competition

How Corporations Can Block Abundance

Jennifer Howard
As Americans struggle with an increasing cost of living, a new poll suggests that the public prefers leaders who create prosperity by taking on concentrated corporate power over those who focus on removing government barriers. Jennifer Howard argues that this reflects a growing recognition that corporations block abundance because they profit from artificial scarcity. She describes how businesses consolidate and then engineer limits to extract wealth. She writes that to achieve shared abundance we have to confront corporate power.
ESG, Corporate Governance & Future of the Firm

Individual Investors Are Polarized, Large Funds Are Not

Enrichetta Ravina
Despite individual investors being strongly divided on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, corporate policies are largely determined by large institutional investors that adopt predominantly moderate ESG stances. In new research, Nicola Persico and Enrichetta Ravina explore this disconnect by examining the mechanisms driving the moderate ESG positions of major financial institutions and investigating potential impacts of allowing individual investors to select their own proxy voters.
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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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Antitrust and Competition

Is Private Equity’s Involvement in Healthcare Really Harmful?

Anthony LoSasso, Ge Bai and Lawton Robert Burns
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.
Antitrust and Competition

How Private Equity Hurts the Healthcare Workforce

Theodosia Stavroulaki
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.
Antitrust and Competition

Does Private Equity Harm the Welfare of Residents in Nursing Homes?

Robert Field
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.
Antitrust and Competition

Does Private Equity Harm Competition in the Hospital Industry?

Brent Fulton
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).

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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Antitrust and Competition

What the FTC v Meta Case Teaches About Big Tech Harms

Georgios Petropoulos, Geoffrey G. Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne
Georgios Petropoulos, Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne review what the Meta antitrust case reveals about its merger and acquisition strategy and what lessons...
Antitrust and Competition

Collective Action and the Lawyers—Take Antitrust Off the Table

Eleanor Fox
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.
Commentary

Don’t Dismantle America’s Audit Regulator—It’s a Strategic Asset Against China

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

Democrats Should Talk Like Normal People

Matthew Lucky
Assistant Director Matt Lucky, Ph.D., reviews Joan Williams’ new book, Outclassed, which reflects on the Democratic Party’s loss of what she calls “middle-status” voters. Williams discusses her book with Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales on this week’s Capitalisn’t episode, which you can listen to here.

Why Blue Collars Went Red

Joan Williams
The following is an excerpt from Joan Williams' new book, “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back,” now out at St. Martin's Press.

A Win for Meta Could Open the Television Broadcasting Market to Consolidation

Joseph Price
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.

We Must Avoid Killer Acquisitions at the Birth of AI

Jonathan Skrmetti and Kevin Frazier
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.

COLUMNS

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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.