Research

This research note employs the quantitative approach developed by Francesco Trebbi, Miao Ben Zhang, and Michael Simkovic (2023) to provide a descriptive overview of the main differences in costs of regulatory compliance across U.S. states for the year 2014 and over the period 2002-2014. These descriptive stylized facts can be useful in grounding extant discussion on regulatory compliance burden across different U.S. regions and over time and presents both unconditional results and results controlling for state industry composition.

Benjamin Egerod explores the information gap that prevents a majority of firms from lobbying. He argues that the lack of lobbying participation from a majority of firms creates a lopsided playing field that gives more power to those that do.

Ecosystem analysis has been a popular but ill-defined concept in antitrust to identify digital products and services that operate across multiple markets. In new research, Konstantinos Stylianou and Bruno Carballa-Smichowski provide a schematic for defining ecosystems to help courts and regulators pursue more sophisticated investigations and interventions into increasingly complicated markets.

New research from SP Kothari, Hamid Mehran and Zirui Song argues that share buybacks - rather than traditional dividends - may actually be safer for financial stability since they offer banks more flexibility and don't signal distress when reduced. The authors show that while dividends create pressure for consistent payments and industry-wide ripple effects when cut, buybacks allow banks to adjust their capital distribution to the present circumstances.

As financial markets take on societal challenges like climate change, new research from Robin Döttling, Doron Levit, Nadya Malenko and Magdalena Rola-Janicka explores how shareholder democracy interacts with the political process to impact public goods provisions. The authors investigate the potential of investor-driven governance to supplement the shortfalls of the regulatory system, highlighting both benefits and risks posed by wealth inequality and ESG backlash.

In a new paper, Jonathan Masur and Eric Posner argue that although cost-benefit analysis and originalism seem to belong to different legal worlds, they share a common political history of support from many of the same business interests. In recent years, both have gained wide acceptance across the political spectrum. But the ground may be shifting beneath them, and they now face uncertain futures.

In a new report from the Knight-Georgetown Institute, Alissa Cooper, Jasper van den Boom, and Zander Arnao examine how to make remedies most effective in the Google Search antitrust case. They argue that restoring competition in online search requires a comprehensive package of remedies that takes into account the multiple levers by which Google Search built, maintains, and could rebuild its monopoly.

A new paper by Cortelyou C. Kenney explores new developments in game theory to question some of the fundamental assumptions of classical law and economics scholarship, especially the scholarship of John Nash. She suggests that a more sophisticated understanding of cooperation can create fairer and more just institutions that maximize social welfare instead of individual efficiency. 

In new research, Filippo Lancieri and Tommaso Valletti analyze the shortcomings of the current merger review system and defend stronger rebuttable structural presumptions as an important step forward.

Todd A. Gormley, Manish Jha and Meng Wang examine the impact of state-level political dynamics on the support institutional investors provide to socially responsible investing (SRI) proposals. The findings reveal that investors are less likely to support SRI initiatives at firms headquartered in Republican-led states, suggesting that regional political pressures are shaping corporate social responsibility trends.