By exploiting their monopolies and control over rate-setting processes, utility companies are shifting the costs of Big Tech’s voracious energy consumption onto an unwitting public.
In the midst of the chaos, an ambitious policy agenda beckons. Elizabeth Wilkins, Chiraag Bains, Bharat Ramamurti, Samuel Bagenstos, Shilpa Phadke, and K. Sabeel Rahman reflect on how to rebuild, rather than merely reproduce, what came before the wreckage.
According to a common antimonopoly narrative, prior to the merger wave of the 1980s, antitrust enforcement kept the meatpacking industry competitive and relatively decentralized — a situation that enhanced farmers’ autonomy and bargaining power. Yet a closer look at the historical record reveals that this fierce midcentury competition also undermined the unionized labor force and New-Deal regulatory regimes that previously dispersed power. Correcting this narrative should encourage antimonopolists not to become too starry-eyed about “competition” as a market regulator.
New research reveals the extent to which chain coffee shops, restaurants, and big box stores in Black neighborhoods offer a lower quality consumer experience than their counterparts in whiter neighborhoods.
The DOJ’s price-fixing suit against RealPage, which has uncovered brazen collusion among competing landlords across the United States, is a welcome departure from decades of hands-off antitrust enforcement. Yet with prices going up in industry after industry, and so few price-fixing cases brought in recent years, it appears many businesses have determined that the risk of collusion is worth the reward.
In the wake of their recent defeat, Democrats’ natural tendency will be to concede the issue of immigration to Republicans and embrace cruelty-lite versions of their opponents’ positions — a strategy that is bound to fail. Instead, Democrats need to offer their own agenda for immigration and internal migration. To do so, they should look to institutional experiments from a forgotten past.
Though the urban-rural divide can sometimes appear like a primordial fault line in American political life, it is a relatively recent development. The Democratic Party’s collapse in the countryside was the predictable consequence of decisions to prioritize certain constituencies to the neglect of others, as it championed the shift to the metropolitan knowledge economy.
The articles, blogs, exit polls, charts, tweets, and skeets that have been helping us make sense of the 2024 election.
Recent years have witnessed a sea change in consumer protection, ushered in by a new generation of enforcers who reject many of the basic premises from the neoliberal era. They aim not merely to ensure that consumers have the information necessary to discipline firms through choice, but to prevent businesses from using their power to shape markets in ways that take advantage of consumers.
The LPE Blog goes worldwide, bringing you some of our favorite global LPE and LPE-adjacent scholarship from 2024.
As the water level drops on Lake Powell, we have a chance to restore both the habitat of Glen Canyon and an earlier approach to public energy provision, when natural resources were shielded from capitalist exploitation and harnessed for the public good.
How the encroachment of private capital into the broadband ecosystem threatens local provision and the goal of universal, affordable broadband.
What role has Law and Economics played in society and in legal scholarship? A Reply to David Bernstein’s recent critique of LPE.
Over the past decade, private financial markets – the domain of venture capital, private equity, and private credit funds – have grown to the point where they now dominate financial activity. This shift has undermined the protections afforded by existing securities laws and, because pensions are one of the largest contributors to these private funds, has subjected ordinary workers to the opaque, unregulated side of financial markets.
Religious liberty challenges to the Affordable Care Act often appear narrowly focused on exempting specific employers from covering particular types of care, such as contraceptives, sterilization, or gender-affirming care. However, closer examination reveals that such claims should be understood as a major new vector in the campaign against social insurance in the United States.
