Richard B. Baker is Assistant Professor of Economics at The College of New Jersey; Carola Frydman is Professor of Finance at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University; and Eric Hilt is Professor of Economics at Wellesley College. This post is based on their recent paper.
Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in antitrust. In response to the perception that antitrust enforcement has become ineffectual, some commentators have argued that existing statutes may no longer offer regulators adequate tools for policing anticompetitive behavior. Yet the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission hold considerable discretion over how they choose to enforce the law. If modern antitrust is too weak, its weakness may originate in the content of our laws, or alternatively in the approach taken to enforcing those laws. It is not clear whether different leadership at America’s antitrust authorities would have produced different outcomes.