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.

In new research, Renuka Diwan, Paul Eliason, Riley League, Ryan C. McDevitt, James W. Roberts, and Jetson Leder-Luis investigate how Medicare’s shift to a competitive bidding system to reduce prices has inadvertently shifted market share to fraudulent suppliers.

In recent research, Johnathan S. Hartley and Morris K. Kleiner find that occupational licensing is globally pervasive among both developed and developing nations. However, higher national licensing rates are associated with lower GDP per capita, larger informal sectors, and weaker governance scores.

The following is an excerpt from Pentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War US Military Modeled Itself on Private Business by A. J. Murphy, now out at Harvard University Press.

The dynamic competition school claims that competition authorities, by analyzing firms’ capabilities, can protect what this school calls dynamic competition.  Competition authorities, however, cannot adequately analyze firms’ capabilities. This school, therefore, lacks any framework which the authorities can use to analyze what they call dynamic competition. Any framework to protect dynamic competition, or what some call competition to innovate, must instead first identify the future products the competing firms are trying to make, writes Larry Landman.

Matt Lucky reviews Daron Acemoglu’s “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity,” now out at Penguin Press.