Regulation

Jeremy Pilaar and Albert (Haotian) Wang present the weaknesses in current legislative reforms targeting pharmacy benefit managers. They suggest that lawmakers focus on reining in PBM income, limiting fees that PBMs can charge, and empowering state legislative efforts.  

Alberto Heimler argues that antitrust authorities should focus on whether market power allows one party to exploit relationship-specific sunk investments made by another and how that undermines potential innovation, investments, and competition. 

In new research, Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen, Ségal Le Guern Herry & Gabriel Zucman find that Norwegian households that become wealthy today are much less likely to adopt offshore tax evasion strategies under modern high-transparency standards. 

In new research, Tingting Song examines how FRAND principles typically used to discipline excessive or discriminatory terms in SEP licensing can be applied to data brokers in data licensing.

Artificial intelligence agents are beginning to interact in ways that create risks beyond individual misalignment with corporate and social expectations. As happened with global finance after the 2007 crisis, AI governance needs to begin focusing on how good agents can still produce bad systems.

Wealth taxes can make capital markets more efficient when they are optimally combined with lower capital gains taxes, argue Sergio Ocampo, Guttorm Schjelderup, and Floris Zoutman in new research.

Anticompetitive behavior, such as consolidation, in the health-insurance industry has allowed a small group of insurers to dominate the market. One of the main drivers of this behavior is “adverse selection,” where individuals know more about how sick they are than insurance companies do. To mitigate the risk of paying out more claims than they can cover, insurers often raise their premiums. Kellogg’s Amanda Starc and her colleague argue that, to create a truly healthy health-insurance marketplace, regulators and policymakers need a framework for rethinking the complex interactions between adverse selection and regulatory guardrails.

In new research, Francisco E. Beneke Avila proposes a multifactor test to distinguish between the legitimate exercise of the right to lobbying and efforts to capture areas of public policy. He argues that the latter is an abuse of the firm’s political rights that can justify the intervention of EU competition authorities when corporate political activity leads to a lessening of competition. 

In new research, Benjamin Rosa finds that when states ban affirmative action, minority- and women-run businesses become smaller than other contractors and are less likely to enter the market, but are no more likely to close their businesses entirely. 

Although merger review now acknowledges potential harms to labor markets, the analytical tools remain underdeveloped. Shishene Jing proposes identifying “labor market mavericks” as companies essential to maintaining competition among employers and preventing mergers that could reduce wages and other worker benefits.