Erik Peinert is the Research Manager and Editor for the American Economic Liberties Project. In this role, Erik works with Economic Liberties’ leadership and research staff to manage and coordinate the organization’s policy and research agenda.
As a political scientist, Erik’s work on antitrust, competition, and trade has been published in leading academic journals and presented at national and international academic conferences. His current book project, Monopoly Politics: Price Competition, Learning, and the Evolution of Policy Regimes, examines the long-term evolution of politics and policy around competition and market power in the 20th century in the United States and Europe. Looking forward, his research also examines the role of antitrust policies in trade agreements as a form of commercial protectionism.
Erik is an affiliated researcher at the Rhodes Center for International Finance at Brown University, and for the 2021-2022 academic year, a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins SAIS in Washington, DC. Erik received a BA in political science from the University of California at Berkeley, and MA and PhD degrees in political science from Brown University.
You can reach Erik at epeinert@economicliberties.us.
Latest Publications
ProMarket: The Needless Desertion of Robinson-Patman
October 10, 2022 — In ProMarket, Economic Liberties' Senior Legal Counsel Katie Van Dyck and Research Manager & Editor Erik Peinert examines how antitrust enforcers’ desertion of the Robinson-Patman Act allowed power buyers like Walmart and Amazon to take over the economy. The piece also pushes back on claims that reviving the law would be bad for consumers.
ProMarket: Mergers and Smoking Guns
May 13, 2022 — In 1980, Richard Posner and George Stigler drafted a memo to help the Reagan admin “throttle back” antitrust enforcement. As Economic Liberties’ Research Manager & Editor Erik Peinert details for ProMarket, “it gets to the heart of current debates about the direction of antitrust.”
ProMarket: Inflation, Corporate Power, and the Forgotten New Deal
April 13, 2022 — Economic Liberties’ Research Manager and Editor Erik Peinert wrote a piece for ProMarket detailing the ways that the Biden administration can take on inflation and the economic disruptions of supply, employment, and output plaguing the U.S.