The Role of the State

Kaleb Byars argues that while Big Tech censorship may constitute antitrust harm, without reform current law does not provide antitrust agencies or the courts a remedy.

Barak Richman writes that the recently announced investigation of the House Judiciary subcommittee for antitrust into the residency match antitrust exemption presents an opportunity...

The following is an excerpt from Angela Zhang's recent book, High Wire, out at Oxford University Press. Please join the Stigler Center on April 3 at 6:30-7:30 pm CT for a conversation with Zhang, where she'll discuss High Wire with Financial Times' China Technology Correspondent Eleanor Olcott. You can register for the livestream of the event here.

In new research, Dante Donati and Hortense Fong find that the brief TikTok outage in January benefited Meta as advertisers turned to its platforms to reach users. Small businesses, less able to switch, lost out.

Liyang Hou investigates the recent antitrust enforcement in China’s digital sector and highlights how formalistic dominance assessments and merger reviews have shaped the country’s approach to regulating its platform economy.

Alan D. Jagolinzer and Jacob N. Shapiro write that the new Trump administration’s efforts to improve government efficiency through the cancellation of contracts and other promises will inevitably raise costs as businesses and investors demand a risk premium to account for lost trust.

Michelle Meagher writes that to preserve its contributions to the marketplace of ideas about antitrust, the Neo-Brandeisian movement must build out an infrastructure that archives its ideas and makes them accessible to the public. It must also continue to make its case for its core contributions to this marketplace, including on bigness and per se rules.

John B. Kirkwood writes that the future of Neo-Brandeisian movement must focus on three fronts: refining its approach to the consumer welfare standard, which it initially rejected but then used when in power; continuing to influence the monopolization cases against Big Tech and the Federal Trade Commission’s non-compete rule; and configuring the principles to govern competition in the economy’s next great tech frontier: artificial intelligence.

State occupational-licensing requirements have ballooned over the past decades to cover seemingly nonsensical professions, raising barriers to entry and costs for consumers. Ray Ball, S.P. Kothari, and Andrew Sutherland argue that the current deregulatory movement in the United States should target these regulations next.

The Federal Trade Commission under Chair Andrew Ferguson has surprised many by continuing its predecessor’s emphasis on protecting labor markets. Randy Kim writes that while this is a welcome development, it will do little to help workers if President Donald Trump does not also continue his predecessor’s whole-of-government approach. Early indications suggest he will not.