Research

As banks grow, tiered regulation places them in stricter categories to address their greater risks. In new research, Pedro M. Batista finds that transition periods between tiers might delay when some higher standards become mandatory, potentially leaving growing banks exposed while known risks remain unresolved, as happened with Silicon Valley Bank. Federal Reserve reforms should address this gap between growing risks and delayed safeguards.

Prizewinning research in most science-related academic fields has become less concentrated among institutions. However, as Richard B. Freeman, Danxia Xie, Hanzhe Zhang, and Hanzhang Zhou discuss in new research, prizewinners in economics continue to come from a narrow set of American institutions.  

In new analysis, Madhav Parikh examines how competition among banks in the United States shapes the way monetary policy reaches depositors. Tracking U.S. banks from late 2021 through mid-2026, he finds that banks in more concentrated local markets repriced their deposit interest rates less than banks in competitive markets, both as the Fed raised rates and as it cut them.

The Digital Markets Act establishes central rules and enforcement for digital platforms across the European Union, but allows decentralized private enforcement on the national level. In new research, Lena Hornkohl and Barbara Justen reflect on how two recent German court cases show how national litigation can make the DMA more effective, but also highlight the need for mechanisms that aid in consistent interpretation.

In new research, Nandini Gupta and Swarnodeep Homroy show that firms in the United States are choosing politically-aligned suppliers to insure their supply chains against disruption. Aligned relationships are markedly more resilient when shocks hit, but the insurance is paid for in higher input costs and less innovation.

In new research, Elettra Bietti compares the efficacy of the two legal avenues that have arisen to restrain social media’s ability to monopolize people’s time and attention: antitrust policy and product liability for consumer harm. Looking at the results of two recent Meta cases, she finds that product liability has proven the most capable in introducing the frictions needed to reduce social media’s addictive design.

In new research, Nicholas Short, Sophie Hill, and Jacob Brown examine "ideological capture": regulatory capture that works not through lobbying but through experts defining what goals and values regulators may consider. Surveying the public alongside antitrust lawyers, they find the consumer welfare standard marginalizes important public concerns, like the risk of increased layoffs or more lobbying power.

The Neo-Brandeisians and Chicago School have employed different statistics to show respectively that markets are both concentrated and not concentrated, leaving Americans in the dark about who really holds corporate power. The evidence only looks contradictory due to the failure of American antitrust scholarship and regulation to understand how conglomerates collect market power across many neighboring markets, through what Paul Friederiszick calls “adjacent market takeovers.” This strategy can make firms more efficient, but it can also raise prices and weaken competition even as each individual market still looks competitive, he writes, drawing on his new paper, “The Conglomerate Power Puzzle.”

Startups in Africa rely heavily on an equity market dominated by foreign investors and founders who studied or worked outside the continent. In new research, Emanuele Colonnelli, Marcio Cruz, Mariana Pereira-Lopez, Tommaso Porzio and Chun Zhao show that this dynamic exists because local equity is expensive, the pool of local entrepreneurs seeking out funding is small, and local entrepreneurs have limited access to foreign investors.

In new research, Markus Eberhardt, Giovanni Facchini, and Valeria Rueda find that a growing share of PhD graduates from top U.S. economics programs are leaving academia, looking beyond North America, and moving into the private sector, especially towards the tech industry.