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.  

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.

The United States healthcare system has experienced an expansion of private equity ownership. In new research, Theodosia Stavroulaki argues that private equity acquisitions risk harming healthcare by increasing prices, reducing quality of care, limiting access to care, and hurting the labor force.

Investors have poured billions into using artificial intelligence to discover new drugs, and 2026 is the first real test of whether AI-designed medicines actually helps patients. The boom has genuinely transformed the search for molecules — but that was never the costly, failure-prone part of making a medicine, and there AI has so far had little to add. Capital, and the public subsidies have not yet priced the difference, writes Michael A. Santoro.

Adam Smith and the Founding Fathers envisioned a society in which economic and political freedom, grouped together in the ideology of liberalism, would produce a wealthy, free, and peaceful society. Centuries later, this vision has come to fruition, and F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman helped elaborate and advance that vision in their economic and philosophical works. The lesson for today’s populist moment is not to abandon these principles, but to continue to pursue them, as it is their imperfect realization, not their imperfect conceptualization, that burdens today’s society, writes Peter Boettke.

The Neo-Brandeisians and Chicago School have employed different statistics to show respectively that markets are both concentrated and not concentrated, leaving Americans in the dark about who really holds corporate power. The evidence only looks contradictory due to the failure of American antitrust scholarship and regulation to understand how conglomerates collect market power across many neighboring markets, through what Paul Friederiszick calls “adjacent market takeovers.” This strategy can make firms more efficient, but it can also raise prices and weaken competition even as each individual market still looks competitive, he writes, drawing on his new paper, “The Conglomerate Power Puzzle.”

Sarah Kreps argues that elected officials should be cautious of immediately rejecting proposals for local data centers. Instead, officials should capture potential benefits and protect residents by negotiating for better terms.

The transaction fees that businesses incur using credit and debit cards cost Americans billions of dollars each year. Despite the availability of alternative, cheaper account-to-account options that cut out the middleman, Americans have been slow to move away from card payment systems due to market mechanisms that hide the true costs of card transactions to consumers, writes Eli Orbach.