James Wood explores the sources of populism in the United Kingdom, its recent developments, and what this means for the country’s 2024 general election.

The Biden administration's ambitious place-based industrial policy aims to both revitalize struggling regions and bolster America's strategic economic sectors, but these two goals often conflict. Walter Frick writes that while policies that boost economic prospects in distressed areas may not immediately transform them into innovation hubs, they could unlock the potential of future generations and ultimately contribute to the nation's innovative capacity.

Much of the focus of recent antitrust scrutiny has been on companies, with very little attention paid to the motivations of the individual managers setting the anticompetitive strategies of their enterprises. Understanding the concrete personal incentives of the billionaire blockholders entrenched at the helm of most of America’s incumbent corporations is critical to devising effective competition, corporate governance, and tax policy fixes to tackle harmful market concentration at the root.

In new research, Wentian Zhang finds that a reduction in antitrust enforcement causes venture capitalists to significantly decrease their investments in startups, leading to fewer startups going public and diminished innovation.

Many cities across the United States are experiencing structural budget deficits. However, in part due to salary and benefit promises to public-employee unions, there is little capacity to control spending. Local politicians have few electoral incentives to push back against union bargaining demands to address these rising costs.

ProMarket interviewed Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter at the 2024 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference.