Richard Wolfram explores the regulatory concerns of Netflix and Paramount’s competing merger proposals for Warner Bros. Discovery. Based on current antitrust doctrine and guidelines, Paramount would appear to face comparatively fewer barriers to the transaction, but the analysis is hardly black-and-white.

The dynamic competition school claims that competition authorities, by analyzing firms’ capabilities, can protect what this school calls dynamic competition.  Competition authorities, however, cannot adequately analyze firms’ capabilities. This school, therefore, lacks any framework which the authorities can use to analyze what they call dynamic competition. Any framework to protect dynamic competition, or what some call competition to innovate, must instead first identify the future products the competing firms are trying to make, writes Larry Landman.

Matt Lucky reviews Daron Acemoglu’s “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity,” now out at Penguin Press.

The recent case of Chinese online travel platform Ctrip ignoring the warnings of provincial competition authorities until the central government stepped in reveals the limits of China’s decentralized regulatory system. Chun-Kit (Kitson) Ng suggests several ways that China can reform its system to empower the provincial authorities and fulfill the regulatory system’s design to avoid drawing on the central government’s resources.

Summary Teaser: In new research, Jitendra Aswani and William W. Xiong show that countries facing greater risks to their natural assets, from overfishing to deforestation, pay more to borrow, as investors discount their long-run growth prospects. Governments can reduce that premium by implementing green projects that address the risks they actually face, but announcing an intention to do so is not enough.

University of Chicago Law School professor Randy Picker passed away this weekend. Saul Levmore, a colleague at the Law School, remembers Randy's contributions to law scholarship and the University.