News

In new research, Ga-Young Choi and Alex Kim show that tax audits work to deter firm tax avoidance, but with unintended costs for investment and employment for the firm and the broader economy.

Competition authorities and analysts are increasingly focused on the impact of mergers and acquisitions on worker welfare. Using a novel dataset on Canadian firms and workers, David Arnold, Kevin Milligan, Terry S. Moon and Amirhossein Tavakoli test the empirical validity of several theories on how M&A may help or harm workers.

Luigi Zingales argues that Elon Musk is right to sue OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, given the economic principles at stake.

American households accumulated a large stock of savings during World War II, much of which was held in the form of war bonds. After the war, inflationary episodes eroded the purchasing power of these bonds, contributing to a backlash against the incumbent Democrats. In new research, Gillian Brunet, Eric Hilt, and Matthew S. Jaremski study the impact of post-WWII inflation on voting outcomes using data on the sales of savings bonds during the war.

In new research, Monika Leszczyńska explores how consumers’ ideas of morality should inform government agencies and courts as they seek to update and enforce consumer protection laws. The focus is on adapting these laws to address modern business practices in the digital age. These practices involve behavioral manipulation of consumers, resulting in non-monetary damages, such as the invasion of privacy.

For the first time in decades, the Department of Justice filed suit against an airline merger—and won. William McGee argues that the next fight is correcting false assertions concerning JetBlue and Spirit for the sake of future potential mergers, such as one between Alaskan and Hawaiian Airlines.

Most of the scholarship on private enforcement, in which individual citizens sue to enforce legal statutes, has focused on federal-level laws. In new research, Diego A. Zambrano, Neel Guha, Austin Peters, and Jeffrey Xia show how expansive and messy state-level private enforcement statutes are, and explain why previous theories on private enforcement do not explain the dynamic among the states. They conclude that research on state-level private enforcement demands much more attention than previously provided.

Tommaso Valletti argues that economic consultants have made little meaningful contribution to antitrust policy and enforcement over the past 20 years—despite their assertions of bringing academic insights to practice. Valletti calls for more critical scrutiny of consultants' biased economic analyses by antitrust authorities and courts, as well as greater use of structural presumptions in merger review.

In a new paper, Ilyana Kuziemko, Nicolas Longuet-Marx, and Suresh Naidu point to a shift in the Democratic Party’s economic policy, from predistribution to redistribution, as one of the reasons why it has lost less-educated voters.

How can investors use capital markets to encourage emissions reductions? In new research, Matthew E. Kahn, John G. Matsusaka, and Chong Shu examine whether public pension funds are more effective in mitigating pollution when they divest from fossil fuel companies or actively engage their management.