This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each area, we select the most relevant portions of...

Competition in many important industries centers on investment in intellectual property. Firms engage in dynamic, Schumpeterian competition for the market, through sequential winner-take-all races to produce drastic innovations, rather than through static price/output competition in the market....

The health care industry is being transformed. Large firms are merging and acquiring other firms. Alliances and contractual relations between players in this market are shifting rapidly. Within the next few years, many markets are predicted to be dominated by a few large firms. Antitrust...

Brandeis (1914) hypothesized that firms with market power will also attempt to gain political power. To explore this hypothesis empirically, we combine data on mergers with data on lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions in the US from 1999 to 2017. We pursue two distinct empirical...

In contracting out, monitoring is an important policy tool to extract information on firm quality and incentivize quality provision. This paper examines a central quality inspection of nursing homes, a sector with significant welfare implications but widespread public concerns about its quality...

Do corporate control transactions discipline the labor force? Consistent with synergies, new disclosures of employee misconduct in the investment advisory industry drop by between 17 and 22 percent following mergers. Both targets and acquirers have better pre-merger misconduct records than the...

Prison overcrowding is a perennial problem and several states are under court order to reduce crowding. The long-term solution to crowding has been more prisons. The short-term solution is early release. Early release programs can be effective when they balance the savings of reduced prison...

In collaboration with a state environmental regulator in India, we conducted a field experiment to raise the frequency of environmental inspections to the prescribed minimum for a random set of industrial plants. The treatment was successful when judged by process measures, as treatment plants,...

We use unique micro-level depositor data for a bank that faced a run due to a shock to its solvency to study whether depositors monitor banks. Specifically, we examine depositor withdrawal patterns in response to a timeline of private and public signals of the bank's financial health. In...

Many employers have implemented dependent verification (DV) programs, which aim to reduce employee benefits costs by ensuring that ineligible persons are not enrolled in their health plan as dependents. We evaluate a DV program using a panel of health plan enrollment data from a large,...