Books

This report highlights the topics covered in the Stigler Center's 2024 Antitrust and Competition Conference—Antitrust, Regulation and the Diffusion of Innovation, drawing from the conference panels and keynote speeches. 

On July 19, 2023, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) jointly released their draft Merger Guidelines. The Merger Guidelines clarify and guide how the DOJ Antitrust Division and FTC (the agencies) review mergers and acquisitions for possible anticompetitive outcomes. The DOJ first released Merger Guidelines in 1968. The agencies most recently updated the guidelines for horizontal mergers in 2010 and for vertical mergers in 2020. The new guidelines address both horizontal and vertical mergers.

The Stigler Center’s 2023 Antitrust and Competition Conference sought to answer the question: what lies beyond the consumer welfare standard? In collaboration with ProMarket, the Stigler Center published a series of papers on the topic as part of that debate.

On March 10, 2023, U.S. regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank after a run on its deposits. Several other banks, including Signature Bank, Credit Suisse, and First Republic Bank, had to be bought or shut down in the following weeks. This collection of articles from some of the world’s top economists, written and published as events unfolded, explore the reasons for the 2023 banking crisis, the failure of regulators and politicians to prevent this moment, and how governments and banks must reform their policies to prevent similar crises in the future.

Industrial policy was once so out of fashion that it was jokingly called “the policy that shall not be named.” Now it’s back in a big way. On issues ranging from clean energy to semiconductors to COVID-19, governments are trying to improve the performance of key business sectors. Can they manage to do so without subverting competition and subsidizing special interests?

Co-sponsored by the Stigler Center and the Healthcare Initiative at Chicago Booth

This report highlights the topics covered in the Stigler Center’s 2022 Antitrust and Competition Conference—Antitrust: What’s Next?, drawing from the conference panels and various other sources.

In 2021, to mark the 50-year anniversary of George Stigler’s seminal piece “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” the Stigler Center publication ProMarket published an e-book collection of articles commemorating this landmark article and assessing where his theory stands in today’s world.

In 2020, to mark the 50-year anniversary of Milton Friedman’s influential New York Times piece, the Stigler Center publication ProMarket published an e-book collection of articles on the shareholder-stakeholder debate.

The Final Report and Policy Brief for the Stigler Center's 2019 Digital Platforms Committee, which spent over a year studying in-depth how Digital Platforms such as Google and Facebook impact: economy and antitrust laws; data protection; the political system; and the news media industry.

The eBook for the Stigler Center's 2018 Antitrust Conference focused on digital platforms and concentration.

The eBook for the Stigler Center's inaugural Antitrust Conference in 2017.