Since the 1970’s, there has been a progression toward market processes in nations once committed to comprehensive central economic planning. Multinational donors and individual Western countries have expended substantial resources to advise these nations about legal reforms designed to promote...

How should the federal government be organized – and who (i.e., which departments, agencies, bureaus, and commissions) should do what? The issue is not new: President James Madison addressed governmental organization in his 1812 State of the Union Address, and in the last century, it is the...

Of all fields of regulation in the United States, antitrust law relies most heavily on economics to inform the design and application of legal rules. When drafting antitrust statutes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Congress anticipated that courts and enforcement agencies would...

In recent years the United Kingdom and various other countries have decided to restructure the institutions responsible for enforcing competition laws. How should a nation choose among myriad alternative arrangements? This paper lays out nine major institutional choices that governments must...

People are angry about drug prices. What role, if any, should the FDA play in addressing this issue? Historically, the FDA’s answer has been “not our problem.” As the quality and safety agency, the FDA has repeatedly refused to get involved in drug pricing matters, even when its actions...

How should we go about reconciling competition and consumer protection in health care, given the long shadow cast by the state action doctrine? We consider that issue, using a case study drawn from an obscure corner of the pharmaceutical reimbursement market to motivate and inform our analysis....

Worldwide, there are approximately 130 jurisdictions with competition laws. The governmental entities charged with enforcing these laws are typically called “competition agencies,” but many of these entities do things other than competition law. Of the 36 agencies listed in the Global...

We provide empirical evidence that many multi-product firms have each participated in several cartels over the past 50 years. Standard analysis of cartel conduct, as well as enforcement policy, is rooted in the presumption that each cartel in which a given firm participates is a singular...

The conventional wisdom is that the FTC was the governmental equivalent of a leper colony prior to 1969, and its credibility and reputation were restored only by the adoption of the wise recommendations in the 1969 ABA Report. There is no question that the FTC deserves plenty of criticism for...

Following the substantive harmonisation in Regulation (EC) no. 1/2003, the Commission has started more recently to focus on procedure and sanctions, and in January 2016, the European Parliament called for penalties against natural persons. This ‘On Topic’ issue looks at the current state of...