News

Despite individual investors being strongly divided on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, corporate policies are largely determined by large institutional investors that adopt predominantly moderate ESG stances. In new research, Nicola Persico and Enrichetta Ravina explore this disconnect by examining the mechanisms driving the moderate ESG positions of major financial institutions and investigating potential impacts of allowing individual investors to select their own proxy voters.

Georgios Petropoulos, Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne review what the Meta antitrust case reveals about its merger and acquisition strategy and what lessons...

In new research, Petros Boulieris, Bruno Carballa-Smichowski, Maria Niki Fourka and Ioannis Lianos analyze industrial policy from around the world to understand how policymakers are rethinking policy goals. The authors create a set of metrics to measure how different policy orientations improve or sacrifice competition.

Eleanor Fox argues that the leading law firms should have immediately and collectively resisted President Donald Trump’s attacks. Strong, timely collective resistance may have helped staunch democratic backsliding and prevented normalization of repeated, speech-chilling demands. Doing so, however, the firms would have faced the risk of violating the antitrust laws. This article assesses antitrust’s treatment of political action and argues that the space for protected political action needs to be enlarged.

Congress is considering eliminating the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the independent federal agency that “audits the auditors.” Karthik Ramanna and Nemit Shroff write...

Assistant Director Matt Lucky, Ph.D., reviews Joan Williams’ new book, Outclassed, which reflects on the Democratic Party’s loss of what she calls “middle-status” voters. Williams discusses her book with Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales on this week’s Capitalisn’t episode, which you can listen to here.

The following is an excerpt from Joan Williams' new book, “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back,” now out at St. Martin's Press.

Joseph Price writes that how the court in the Meta antitrust case determines the relevant product market may have implications for merger activity among television broadcasters, who have similarly argued that the regulators and courts use outdated market definitions to block consolidation.

The artificial intelligence market is rapidly developing but antitrust regulators are failing to update their policies, write Tennessee Attorney General and Reporter Jonathan Skrmetti and Kevin Frazier. Regulators’ passiveness risks repeating what happened to social media markets, where a few tech giants were able to acquire nascent competitors and dominate the market. The authors propose three policies to help maintain a competitive AI market.

Anthony T. LoSasso, Ge Bai, and Lawton Robert Burns argue that critics of private equity’s involvement in healthcare ignore that it is often the only financial lifeline available to distressed healthcare providers and can introduce an improvement in outcomes, including quality of care.