A look back at the five most-listened-to Capitalisn’t episodes from 2025.

COMMENTARY

Warner Bros as Antitrust’s Streaming Stress Test

Warner Bros. (“Warner”), a prized and consequential media company, is once again on the auction block, and both Netflix and Paramount Skydance are competing to buy it. Barak Orbach observes that bidders’ appetites for prized media enterprises often foster undue optimism about the feasibility of successfully integrating them. He argues that antitrust scrutiny of any acquisition of Warner would likely underscore the need to modernize certain antitrust doctrines and analytical frameworks.

RESEARCH

Higher Education Is Becoming More Politically Polarized

In new research, Riley Acton, Emily Cook, and Paola Ugalde find that college campuses in the United States have become increasingly polarized over the last few decades, and both liberals and conservatives are willing to pay much more to attend colleges with likeminded peers.
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Do Unequal Places Cost More To Live in?

In recent research, Yumin Hu, Luca Macedoni, and Mingzhi Xu explore how high income inequality can raise the costs of living. They compare grocery products around the U.S., finding that large retailers will increase the prices for their goods in places where income inequality is also high.

Open Source Is Having a Moment in AI Regulation. Here Is What the Data Says

Jérémie Haese and Christian Peukert present new empirical findings on core open source technologies for the web and AI. Open source holds promise for making AI systems more transparent and secure, but it risks masking continued centralized control under the guise of openness.

How ESG Pay Metrics Change CEO Incentives

In new research, Vikas Agarwal, Juan-Pedro Gómez, Kasra Hosseini, and Manish Jha explore how companies reward executives for meeting sustainability targets. They evaluate how ESG metrics to determine executive pay create tradeoffs with traditional financial incentives, and what that means for the future of ESG goals.

How Political Alignment Between Cities and Governors Shapes Municipal Borrowing Costs

In new research, Ramona Dagostino and Anya Nakhmurina discuss how political misalignment between state governors and city leadership can affect how cities access financing, particularly in municipal bond pricing and crisis prevention investment.

Canceling the Antitrust Show? Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s Latest Attempt To Keep Its Monopoly

Live Nation-Ticketmaster has filed a motion for summary judgment to persuade the judge presiding over the antitrust lawsuit against the company that the government has not turned up enough evidence of wrongdoing or harm to consumers. Diana L. Moss refutes the motion’s main arguments and defends the government’s lawsuit.

READING LISTS

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.

Novo Nordisk’s Offer To Acquire Metsera Constitutes Attempted Monopolization

Hannah Pittock uses weight-loss company Novo Nordisk’s offer to acquire Metsera to create a three-prong framework by which the antitrust agencies can identify when an invitation to exclude a rival from a market constitutes illegal exclusionary conduct under Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

Novo Nordisk’s Killer Non-Acquisition Merger Contract Proposal Is a Case of “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose”

Steve Salop explores the anticompetitive innovation behind weight-loss giant Novo Nordisk’s offer to acquire Metsera. Novo’s proposed contract presents a new tactic by which firms with market power can preclude rival mergers that will lead to procompetitive entry.

Will Trump’s Drug-Pricing Order Reduce Prices for Americans?

President Donald Trump has, across two administrations, sought to lower drug prices for Americans, most recently with executive order “Delivering Most-Favored-Nation Prescription Drug Pricing to American Patients.” Margherita Colangelo explains why his order is unlikely to accomplish its goal.

Is Competition Law Making Us Sick?

In new research, Benjamin Wood, Sven Gallasch, Nicholas Shaxson, Katherine Sievert, and Gary Sacks write that competition underenforcement and a narrow regulatory focus on prices and output has allowed industries that produce harmful consumer products, such as tobacco or ultra-processed foods, to increase demand and, consequentially, harm to society. They argue that competition law must evolve to consider health impacts.

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.

Defending the Merger Efficiency Defense: A Response to Herbert Hovenkamp

Nancy L. Rose and Jonathan Sallet respond to a recent article by Herbert Hovenkamp, in which he argues that the merger-efficiencies defense, which requires merging parties to demonstrate competitive benefits of a merger in order to rebut a prima facie case of harm presented by plaintiffs, is too burdensome and runs contrary to empirical evidence.

Swedish Workers Lose Out In M&A Even When CEOs Gain

Summary Teaser: In a new working paper, Jakob Beuschlein, Jósef Sigurdsson, and Horng Chern Wong find that workers at acquired firms in Sweden experience wage cuts. Rather than from the increased monopsony power of employers, these wage cuts are due to rent redistribution toward higher CEO pay.

The Story of Labor Specialization Is a Bit More Complicated

The following is an excerpt from “The Division of Rationalized Labor” by Michelle Jackson, now out at Harvard University Press. 

Everything, Enshittified, All at Once

Matt Lucky reviews two new books exploring why digital platforms are failing users and how to rediscover the internet’s original promises of an abundance of high-quality and cheap services: Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It and Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.

What Brazil’s Pix Reveals About WTO Rules for the Platform Economy

In the second of two articles, Jeff Alvares analyzes the competing arguments around Pix under World Trade Organization rules—a debate involving broader questions about how international trade rules need to reflect the complexity of public services in the digital economy.

The Political Economy of Brazil’s Pix Payment System

In the first of two articles, Jeff Alvares explores how Brazil’s public digital payments system achieved transformative financial inclusion through vertically integrated infrastructure, creating a model now facing scrutiny under international trade law and raising questions about the boundaries of legitimate public infrastructure provision.

States Are Reshaping the Noncompete Landscape Even as a Federal Ban Disappears

In new research, Norman Bishara and Lorenzo Luisetto analyze the nature and proliferation of state legislative activity to regulate noncompete agreements since 2009. In the absence of a federal rule, these developments represent a promising step toward curbing the abuse of noncompete agreements.

COLUMNS

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