News

Big Tech’s efforts to push Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter to recuse themselves from participating in lawsuits against the companies due to prior work have no legal basis and are naked efforts to weaken agency enforcement, writes Laurence Tribe.

Joshua Gray and Cristian Santesteban show how the Federal Trade Commission could have used its 2023 draft Merger Guidelines to focus its challenges against Microsoft-Activision and Meta-Within squarely on the pressing economic concern of protecting competition during critical technological transitions making full use of the law’s traditional incipiency standard.

Marianne Bertrand describes the contributions of Claudia Goldin, this year's Nobel prize winner in economics, as well as her relationship with Goldin as a colleague.

Bruno Pellegrino and Geoff Zheng explain how their novel methodology combining survey data and economic modeling can be used to quantify major questions, such as the economic loss from government regulation. This loss, they find, amounts to $154 billion in seven European countries each year.

George Stigler posited that economic regulation is best understood as a product created via a market process. In the market for regulation, different participants—such as politicians, firms, and voters—buy and sell the rules of the game to serve their individual interests. In new research, Jac Heckelman and Bonnie Wilson use Stigler’s theory of economic regulation and special interest capture to study why foreign aid to developing countries that is tied to market reform has not successfully accomplished its goals.

In this second article on real estate in the current high-interest-rate environment, Joseph L. Pagliari Jr. explores banks’ exposure to commercial real estate, who might help fill the credit void as bank funding dries up, how the work-from-home phenomenon impacts commercial real estate prices, particularly the office sector, and what risks large urban centers face with emptied office buildings.

There are concerns among bankers and economists that commercial real estate prices are at risk of decreasing substantially. Joseph L. Pagliari, Jr. explains how commercial real estate should be priced based on current and projected inflation and interest rates. A subsequent article will explore if concerns about bank and broader economic vulnerabilities to lower CRE prices.

Expert civil servants devise ever more sophisticated policies to tackle emergencies such as climate change. But when voters lose faith in experts, they vote for anti-elite populist leaders who promise to drain the swamp in the civil service. Gabriele Gratton and Barton E. Lee write that understanding populist voters’ calculations and mistrust is key to designing democratic institutions that can address the most pressing challenges of our times.

Google is on trial for anticompetitive behaviors designed to protect its monopoly in internet search. Herb Hovenkamp analyzes several possible remedies the presiding court and Department of Justice could pursue and suggests which ones may succeed in reinforcing competition to protect consumer interests.

The return of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as president of Brazil accompanies a renewed emphasis on sustainability. However, discrepancies in his rhetoric and the policy of his administration reveals a rift between the administration’s twin goals of sustainability and economic development, writes Stephanie Tondo