The OxyContin epidemic had large demographic effects on communities in the United States. In new research, Carolina Arteaga, Victoria Barone, and Stephen Claassen find that Purdue Pharma’s marketing strategy targeted specific areas, causing college-educated residents to flee and increasing fertility rates among the most affected populations.

The EU’s constitutional framework and European Union Court of Justice’ case law have evolved since the European Union enacted the first Merger Guidelines in 2004. The revised Merger Guidelines should better engage with these developments and reflect the priority constitutional values and democracy now play in economic policy, writes Kati Cseres.

In a new working paper, Benjamin Verschuere and Angus Cameron argue that the wide dispersion in economists' forecasts for the impact of artificial intelligence on the economy stems from two gaps. The first is that estimates for growth, jobs, and prices are each built in isolation, with no single framework to reconcile them. The second is that models fixate on AI’s current capabilities, rather than on how fast it spreads and how much of a given job it can eventually reach. The authors build a unified framework that predicts roughly $2 trillion in long-run output gains, the loss of about 20 million American jobs, and falling prices.

The Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter strips independent agencies of removal protections that made regulatory policy predictable across administrations. In new research, Brian Feinstein and Daniel Hemel find that equity markets assign real value to precisely that kind of insulation.

In new research examining 44 million U.S. mortgages and nearly 5,000 bank mergers over three decades, Celso Brunetti, Jeffrey H. Harris, and Ioannis Spyridopoulos find that bank consolidation does not raise mortgage rates, restrict credit access, or degrade loan quality. Local mortgage markets remain intensely competitive. 

The European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines give a central role to dynamic competition in merger review. Some scholars have criticized dynamic competition as an analytical tool that seems to always discourage government intervention, given how quickly and unexpectedly—or dynamically—innovation can remake a market. Nicolas Petit, Selcukhan Unekbas, Bowman Heiden, and Pierre Regibeau argue this critique ignores the several large cases in which regulators used dynamic competition to intervene in a merger.