The Role of the State

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.

Critics of the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit last week to block the Kroger-Albertsons merger claim that the agency incorrectly limits the relevant buyer-side market to unionized grocery workers. Steve C. Salop argues that the critics are wrong, and that standard antitrust analysis shows the FTC has it right.

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.

Although the antimonopoly neo-Brandeisians and the labor movement share many goals, including a desire to reduce the power of big business, significant tensions exist, such as labor’s past support for mergers when they advance the ability of workers to unionize. Kate Andrias traces the history of labor’s relation with antitrust to show that, despite historical and contemporary tensions, there have also been deep connections between the two movements that show how they can better complement each other in the future.

At the heart of the United States Google Search case is the monopolizing effect of Google securing for its own search offering the status of default search engine on a web browser, such as Safari, Chrome, or Firefox. The authors review the behavioral economics and empirical evidence of this effect and suggest several conduct and structural remedies to open up the search market to competition.

In new research, Elise Blasingame, Christina Boyd, Roberto Carlos, and Joseph Ornstein explore how the Trump administration used a quota policy for immigration judges working under the Department of Justice's purview to influence how they adjudicated cases. The authors find the policy successfully nudged more judges to rule against immigrant plaintiffs.

Christian Bergqvist has identified 100-plus antitrust cases against Google spanning 23 jurisdictions and classifies them by the service in question and its alleged harms. Most of these fall within eight groups. Bergqvist’s analysis provides a picture of recent shifts in antitrust enforcers’ regulation of Big Tech and the potentially transformative consequences for Google and the entire tech industry.