How do regulatory agencies decide how strictly to regulate an industry? They sometimes use cost-benefit analysis or claim to, but more often the standards they invoke are so vague as to be meaningless. This raises the question whether the agencies use an implicit standard or instead regulate in...

Donald Trump campaigned as a populist but how can a populist who blames the “establishment” for the country's failures, rule, when the government bureaucracy is itself a creature of the establishment? The answer that appears to be emerging is a “personalist” style of leadership that may...

Recent scholarship has shown that institutional investors may cause softer competition among product market rivals because of their significant ownership stakes in competing firms in concentrated industries. However, while calls for litigation against them under Section 7 of the Clayton Act are...

The existing system of private property interferes with allocative efficiency by giving owners the power to hold out for excessive prices. We propose a remedy in the form of a tax on property, based on the value self-assessed by its owner at intervals, along with a requirement that the owner...

While the labor market implications of mergers have been historically ignored as "out of market" effects, recent actions by the Department of Justice (DOJ) place buyer market power (i.e., monopsony) at the forefront of antitrust policy. We develop a theory of multi-plant ownership and monopsony...