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Antitrust and Corporate Power
Why market concentration became a live issue again—and how economic evidence enters the courtroom and the court of public opinion.
Antitrust enforcement surged and receded across the twentieth century. A period of aggressive merger control and breakups gave way to approaches more tolerant of scale—sometimes on the theory that efficiency gains benefit consumers, sometimes from difficulty proving harm in fast-moving tech markets.
Today, critics argue that dominant platforms and roll-ups in sectors like health care require tougher rules, while defenders warn that ham-handed intervention could chill innovation.
Evidence beyond headlines
Economists supply theories of harm, market definitions, and retrospective studies of prices after consolidation. None of that replaces democratic deliberation, but it disciplines slogans.
Regional data can illustrate where economic activity clusters: a single campus, a supplier basin, or a thin labor market. Those facts do not prove illegal conduct, but they explain why national markets still land somewhere in particular.
Links to openness and trade
Globalization and corporate strategy intertwine: multinationals route inputs through tax and regulatory environments while households face shelves of imported goods. Antitrust debates increasingly ask whether traditional consumer-price tests miss risks to workers, innovation, or democracy.