Antitrust – LPE Project

A Dialysis Duopoly: How Public Funding Entrenched Private Power

Eve Zelickson — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a series on the corporate consolidation and financialization of health care. Read the rest of the posts here. ** ** ** For the half-million people in the U.S. with kidney failure, survival rests in the hands of two powerful corporations—DaVita and Fresenius. Together, these companies control over 70% of the outpatient dialysis market. But the history of dialysis isn’t a simple...

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Consolidating Care: A Symposium on Medicine and Market Power

Eve Zelickson — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This post introduces a series on the corporate consolidation and financialization of health care. Read the rest of the posts here. ** ** ** When Luigi Mangione fatally shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson this past December, the internet erupted with declarations of solidarity and anxious calls for condemnation. His vigilante campaign against corporate greed, and subsequent heroization...

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Prices and Supply, and How Landlords Control Them

Liz Brown — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Housing is the heart of the American political economy. Renting is often a stopgap to homeownership, with countless Americans traversing this path before securing a place of their own. But as millions of tenants pay more of their income in rent than ever before, the promise of an affordable alternative to homeownership has dissipated. Solving unaffordability and restoring the American dream means...

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Antimonopoly and Artificial Intelligence

Eve Zelickson — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 11:00:00 +0000

In the last few months, two major events in the world of artificial intelligence have raised the temperature in the AI arms race. The first was technical: the launch of Chinese firm Deepseek’s AI model. American AI giants like OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and Google were caught flat footed by a small Chinese firm which met or exceeded their AI performance with a fraction of the resources.

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“Business Goes To The Wage Cutter”: Abusive Labor Practices And Unfair Competition

Liz Brown — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Employers can mistreat their workers in many ways. An employer might pay its workers substandard wages or force them to work overlong hours. It might coerce its workers into signing noncompete agreements or TRAPs that prevent them from leaving their current job or finding a new one. It might surveil, discipline, or discharge workers that try to unionize or engage in concerted action.

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Did More Competition Make Meatpacking Fairer?

James Brandt — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 11:00:00 +0000

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.

Is Anyone Afraid of Breaking The Price-Fixing Laws Anymore?

Liz Brown — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Robbing a bank is easy. Getting away with it is the hard part. Most bank robbers are caught the same day because there are numerous cameras that blanket the interior and exterior of the buildings, the police are alerted while the crime is still in progress, and most robberies are committed during daylight hours. It is well known that law enforcement will throw everything they have at catching bank...

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From the Vault: LPE & Antitrust

James Brandt — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 11:00:00 +0000

This fall, we’re running a new series – From the Vault – where we dip into the archive and highlight some of our favorite posts on a particular topic. For new readers, it’s an opportunity to discover important insights from our ever-growing back catalogue. For longtime readers, it’s a chance to see how LPE thinking has developed over these past seven(!) years. To kick off the series...

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The FTC Abolishes Non-Compete Clauses

James Brandt — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 11:00:00 +0000

On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission enacted one of the most significant regulations of the Biden years: a comprehensive ban on non-compete clauses. The final rule prohibits new non-compete clauses for all workers, regardless of line of work or income, and makes existing non-competes null and void for everyone except senior executives. A neurologist making $1 million a year and a gig worker...

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(Some of) The Best New LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship

James Brandt — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Today, many in the United States will witness that rare cosmic coincidence known as a total solar eclipse. Yet even as blackness sweeps across the sky, one source of illumination will remain undiminished: the hottest forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent scholarship, which we’ve gathered together from the most recent submission cycle. There is, of course, more excellent work being done than any...

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