News

Concerns about market concentration and its effects on competition are at the heart of antitrust policy. Will Macheel explains the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) as a common measure of market concentration, its implications for United States antitrust policy, and potential drawbacks of the measure. He closes the article by highlighting research on the HHI as a regulatory tool for screening mergers.

Piergiuseppe Fortunato, Tanmay Singh, and Marco Pecoraro research the behavior of populist leaders and parties around the world and how their policies influence subsequent government spending. Their research shows that populists from either side of the ideological spectrum have very little in common in terms of policy despite similar anti-elite rhetoric.

ProMarket Student Editor Surya Gowda speaks with Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow Katie J. Wells about her new book with Kafui Attoh and Declan Cullen, Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City. Wells discusses how Uber stepped in to solve local government failures, but introduced new problems in the process.

David Ennis evaluates how well the Affordable Care Act has met its expectations and where it has fallen short ten years after its implementation.

Eric A. Posner argues that merger review would benefit from involving union representatives to protect labor interests.

Gus Hurwitz replies to Jonathan Masur and Eric Posner’s May 8 article defending the Federal Trade Commission’s Congressional mandate to enforce a rule banning noncompetes. He argues that Congressional responses to FTC rulemaking in the 1970s suggest courts are unlikely to find that the FTC possesses such authority, either as a matter of statutory interpretation or under the major questions doctrine.

In new research, Sarah Schindler and Kellen Zale find that the vast majority of the most populous cities in the United States do not directly notify renters of land-use hearings. Such hearings provide a forum for local members of the public to voice opinions about how land should be used for housing and other construction and inform the decisions of policymakers. The failure to directly notify renters about these hearings can skew the decision-making process—and the housing market— toward homeowners and exacerbate anti-development tendencies in land-use law.

Lucian Bebchuk and Robert Jackson argue that the Tesla board’s prediction that restoring Musk’s old pay package would require no new compensation charge to Tesla’s financial statement seems not to have been based on any independent accounting advice. This could carry substantial risks for Tesla stockholders.

Lucian Bebchuk argues that, in response to the Delaware court decision invalidating the 2018 pay grant to Elon Musk, the Tesla board did not react with contrition and an attempt to improve its governance, but rather followed an approach of dismissal and defiance.

In a new paper, Sebastian Edwards details the numerous and varied contributions of University of Chicago faculty to exchange rates and monetary policy from 1892 to 1992.