The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced in a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) last month that it intends to ban most noncompete agreements. Is that a good idea? As a matter of policy, the question is debatable. So far as the NPRM is concerned, however, that debate is largely hypothetical. It is unlikely that any rule the FTC issues will ever take effect.

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Government competition enforcers and policymakers are charged with ensuring India’s economic development by protecting the interests of consumers and ensuring freedom of trade in India’s markets. Regulation of digital markets is an increasingly important component of this enterprise. But emulating Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) by imposing preemptive constraints on digital platforms would be particularly destructive in India’s unique and developing market. 

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Various states recently have enacted legislation that requires authors, publishers, and other copyright holders to license to lending libraries digital texts, including e-books and audio books. These laws violate the Constitution’s conferral on Congress of the exclusive authority to set national copyright law. Furthermore, as a policy matter, they offend free-market principles.

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The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) directs the Federal Communications Commission to prevent discrimination in broadband access. In addition to preventing racial, ethnic, or religious discrimination, the law seeks to remedy income discrimination. At the same time, the IIJA orders the FCC to take account of economic and technical feasibility of preventing the proscribed discrimination. These provisions of the IIJA raise complex legal and economic questions. Should the FCC focus on discriminatory intent or disparate impacts? How can the FCC prevent income discrimination while simultaneously accounting for economic feasibility?

This webinar discussion on the topic was recorded Feb. 13, 2023 with Rob McDowell (former commissioner of the FCC), Eric Fruits (ICLE), and Jessica Melugin (CEI), and was moderated by Kristian Stout (ICLE). Due to technical difficulties with the video feed of this event, only the audio is embedded below.

Abstract

Conservation easements, a widely used tool to preserve land for conservation purposes, suffer from a fundamental flaw in lacking a means of adapting the permanent interests they create to changed conditions. This flaw is becoming more apparent as the early generation of these interests age and climate change threatens to bring more rapid demands for adaptation of existing conservation goals in light of changed conditions. Drawing on lessons from successes in international financial centers and U.S. states that are successful in jurisdictional competition, this article argues that the law should embrace measures that enable such competition in providing for shared governance of land between conservation interests and private landowners.

ICLE Director of Law & Economics Programs Gus Hurwitz was a guest on The Cyberlaw Podcast to discuss, among other topics: the electronic surveillance capabilities of the downed Chinese spy balloon; the brief but pointed calls for antitrust and data privacy reform in President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address; the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) recent loss in court on its challenge to Meta’s acquisition of Within; and other issues that may be on the horizon for FTC enforcement later this year. The full episode is embedded below.

Abstract

Researchers have frequently used publicly available data on product ranks to estimate nonpublic sales quantities, believing that there is a linear relationship between logged rank and logged sales values due to the assumption that sales follow a power law. However, using data on book sales, which are commonly thought to follow a power law, we find that the (double logged) relationship between ranking and sales is not linear, but actually concave. We demonstrate that this concavity is likely to cause poor predictions of sales in many instances. We also explore the use of nonlinear specifications as an alternative method to predict sales from ranks and find a simple specification that ameliorates many of these poor sales estimates. We illustrate some of the problems of applying a linear technique to this nonlinear relationship by examining the claim that the greater product variety made available to shoppers on the Internet has a large positive impact on social welfare, and also a claim about sales levels in top 20 and top 50 “charts.”

One major way by which the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB) seeks to attract foreign investors is the Pioneer Certificate Incentive. This exempts businesses that introduce substantially more advanced technology, skillsets, or know-how from corporate tax or taxes them at a concessionary rate of 5 or 10 per cent for five years. The Pioneer rate is a large discount relative to the normal corporate tax rate of 17 per cent.

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Importance  Many physicians believe that most medical malpractice claims are random events. This study assessed the association of prior paid claims (including a single prior claim) with future paid claims; whether public disclosure of prior paid claims affects future paid claims; and whether the association of prior and future paid claims decayed over time.

Objective  To examine the association of 1 or more prior paid medical malpractice claims with future paid claims.

Design, Setting, and Participants  This study assessed the association between prior paid claims (including a single prior claim) with future claims; whether public disclosure of prior claims affects future paid claims; and whether the association of prior and future paid claims decayed over time. This retrospective case-control study included all 881,876 licensed physicians in the US. All data analysis took place between July, 2018 and January, 2023.

Exposure  Paid medical malpractice claims.

Main Outcome and Measures  Association between a prior paid medical malpractice claim and likelihood of a paid claim in a future period, compared with simulated results expected if paid claims are random events. Using the same outcomes, we also assessed whether public disclosure of paid claims affects future paid claim rates.

Results  This study included all 881,876 physicians licensed to practice in the US at the time of the study. Overall, 3.3% of the 841,?961 physicians with 0 paid claims in the prior period had 1 or more claims in the future period vs 12.4% of the 34?,512 physicians with 1 paid claim in the prior period; 22.4% of the 4,189 physicians with 2 paid claims in the prior period; and 37% of the 1,214 physicians with 3 paid claims in the prior period. The association between prior claims and future claims was similar for high-medical-malpractice-risk and lower-risk specialties; 1 prior-period claim was associated with a 3.1 times higher likelihood of a future-period claim for high-risk specialties (95% CI, 2.8-3.4) vs a 4.2 times higher likelihood for lower-risk specialties (95% CI, 3.8-4.6). The predictive power of a prior paid claim for future claims declined gradually as the time since the prior claim increased, for prior or future periods up to 10 years. Public disclosure did not affect the association between prior and future paid claims.

Conclusions and Relevance  In this study of paid medical malpractice claims for all US physicians, a single prior paid claim was associated with substantial, long-lived higher future claim risk, independent of whether a physician was practicing in a high- or low-risk specialty, or whether a state publicly disclosed paid claims. Timely, noncoercive intervention, including education, has the potential to reduce future claims.