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.

In February, the Federal Trade Commission settled with pharmaceutical benefits manager (PBM) Express Scripts. The FTC had sued Express Scripts and two other large PBMs under the long dormant Section 5 of the FTC Act, which targets “unfair methods of competition.” The settlement suggests that the FTC may succeed in addressing the convoluted contracts between PBMs, drug manufacturers, health insurers, and employers that drive up drug prices for Americans. It also opens unchartered territory for antitrust enforcement and the limits of Section 5, argue Fiona Scott Morton and Mariah Smith.

The Stigler Center is putting out a call for papers for its 2027 annual conference. The theme of this year's conference will be the...

In new research, Andrey Simonov, Daniil Mikhailov, Ruben Enikolopov, and Ruben Durante estimate that when a 2016 law pushed Russia’s leading news aggregator Yandex to reduce its references to independent outlets, readers kept following its recommended news stories as before, reducing traffic to the excluded outlets. In response, excluded outlets changed the news they produced.

In new research, Yulia Chikish, Gregory J. Colman, Dhaval M. Dave, Brad R. Humphreys, Zachary Santamaria, and Zachary Winship find that New York City congestion pricing has reduced emergency medical services response times.

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.