Stronger patents can lead to more innovation by creating an incentive for research and development. They also can be used protectively, creating long-lasting monopolies. At the Institute, we’re asking to what extent the law should safeguard patents, and where patent law hurts economic progress.
Laws
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LEPC VII: Growth Strategy in the States
ConferenceHosted by Law, Economics and Policy Conference (LEPC)
Dec 8–10, 2025
LEPC VII will bring together leading thinkers, practitioners, and policymakers to analyze the drivers behind this sub national success, and to chart actionable pathways for the future. Each session outlined explores a foundational dimension of India’s growth story, with attention to both policy diagnosis and on-the-ground innovation.
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Not the Fix—The Tell: The Meaning of a $100,000 H-1B Fee
Oct 20, 2025
The new $100,000 H-1B fee tacitly acknowledges what early policy architects signaled: expanding temporary tech visas can depress domestic wages. By bringing the fully loaded cost of a new H1B hire closer to what the local market would require to recruit and retain comparable talent, it narrows the wedge between visa-enabled staffing and hiring Americans at market rates.
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Rebooting Antitrust’s Normative Economic Theory
Dec 16, 2024
Industrial organization economists have caused antitrust to cling to an antiquated and disproven economic theory.
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Working Paper
Antitrust’s Normative Economic Theory Needs a Reboot
Dec 2024
Welfare economists and moral philosophers have shown that the Consumer Welfare Standard is biased in favor of wealthy individuals and corporations—the very powers the antitrust law is supposed to regulate.
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Turin Festival of Economics 2024
ConferenceMay 30–Jun 2, 2024
Who owns knowledge?
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Overdraft Fees, Credit Card Late Fees, and the Lump of Profit Fallacy
Apr 15, 2024
Predetermined profit margins and prices hidden in the back end of a transaction are really just market failures.
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Merger Tests in Practice: A Critical Analysis
May 8, 2023
Current tests for mergers are in practice deeply flawed.
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Working Paper
The Perils of Antitrust Econometrics: Unrealistic Engel Curves, Inadequate Data, and Aggregation Bias
May 2023
Antitrust econometrics relies on often-implausible assumptions
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Ayn Rand vs. Elinor Ostrom: The Fight for the Future of Social Media
Mar 9, 2023
The contrasting ideologies at play in this tech sector mirror the conflicting ideologies in economics
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Why Economists Should Support Populist Antitrust Goals
Dec 13, 2022
Despite the accumulation of serious and unsolvable problems, the Consumer Welfare Standard survives and continues to be taught to students for reasons unrelated to theoretical consistency and empirical confirmation.
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Working Paper
Why Economists Should Support Populist Antitrust Goals
Dec 2022
The Consumer Welfare Standard is severely limited or defective, preventing it from being an appropriate standard for modern antitrust.
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Top Antitrust Expert: We Need a New Approach to Giant Tech Firms Like Google
Nov 28, 2022
Economist Cristina Caffarra, a leader in competition and antitrust, warns that ever-expanding tech giants raise concerns about the extent of their power.
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The Economic Case for Neo-Brandeisian Antitrust Goals
Mar 30, 2022
The Consumer Welfare Standard of antitrust is outdated and defective
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Working Paper Series
An Economic Defense of Multiple Antitrust Goals: Reversing Income Inequality and Promoting Political Democracy
Mar 2022
The Consumer Welfare Standard of antitrust is outdated and defective
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The Erroneous Foundations of Law and Economics
Feb 25, 2021
Conservative legal theory is based on a shoddy definition of what constitutes “efficiency”