Market-oriented theorizing fails to capture the reality of government intervention in the global economy. Trade and investment measures by governments around the globe, designed to protect strategic industries and maintain a security of supply in the wake of a return to strategic competition, are emblematic of the need to shift our analysis of the global economy. We have labeled this phenomenon “new economic statecraft” and have invited this special issue to examine this phenomenon across countries and sectors of the global economy. Traditionally, economists have largely focused on efficiency gains and the reduction of transaction costs rather than considering the political and strategic aspects of trade and capital flows. This existing analysis fails to capture the reality that many governments are using economic levers to compete in “strategic” sectors of their economy through intervention at the border, behind the border, and beyond the border. To analyze these phenomena, this article and the associated special issue investigates five theorized drivers of state intervention in the global economy to explain when and how governments intervene in their markets. We also hope that this approach can help guide further empirical work on state-business relations and global political and economic competition.

“Stealth mergers” are not reported to the government because they fall below the required size threshold. We study stealth mergers involving public targets for which manipulation of transaction sizes is unlikely. These stealth mergers result in less R&D spending, patenting, and capital expenditures, and in lower value patents for both acquiring firms and their competitors relative to non-stealth mergers. Industry concentration increases, and product market competition decreases for stealth acquirers. Stealth acquirers and their competitors earn higher cumulative abnormal returns relative to non-stealth mergers. Our results suggest more government scrutiny is warranted for stealth mergers.

Scholars of gender have long realized that questions regarding gender, women, and politics require a multi-method, nuanced approach. When a plurality of white women voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, social scientists increasingly began to recognize the urgency of undertaking new approaches to understanding gender, race, and voting behavior in the United States.1 Since then, researchers have helped us understand why so many white women support right-wing candidates and policies that aim to suppress their autonomy, offering explanations such as the influence of belief in traditional gender roles (Christley 2022), “possessive investments in white heteropatriarchy” (Strolovitch, Wong, and Proctor 2017, 354), and “gendered nationalism” in American politics (Deckman and Cassese 2021, 278). In more recent years — as election results and polling suggest growing numbers of men of color have shifted rightward — there has been increased interest in employing an intersectional approach to analyze the gulf between men and women of color.

There is a scarcity of psychological interventions for self-harm in young people, either developed or adapted for use in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). ATMAN is a psychological intervention developed in India for youth with three key modules: problem-solving, emotion regulation and social network strengthening skills in addition to crisis management. ATMAN was delivered in 27 youth with a history of self-harm (14–24 years old) sequentially by a specialist and it a non-specialist counsellor. Out of 27, 18 youth who started the ATMAN intervention completed it, and 13 completed the 10-month follow-up. There was a significant reduction in post-intervention scores on Beck’s Scale for Suicidal Ideation (BSI) (mean difference [confidence interval]: 14.1 [17.2, 10.9]) and Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) (9.6 [12.8, 6.4]) from the baseline scores, irrespective of who delivered the intervention (non-specialist vs. specialist). The difference remained significant at the 10-month follow-up (BSI: 17.0 [20.5, 13.6] and PHQ-9: 10.5 [14.5, 6.6]). Themes such as improved understanding of self-harm acting as a deterrent, using ATMAN strategies to deal with daily life distress, and the importance of addressing stigma in self-harm emerged during the qualitative interviews. Although requiring further evaluation, ATMAN shows promise as a scalable intervention that can be used in LMICs to reduce the burden of suicide in young people.

We consider uniformly random lozenge tilings of simply connected polygons subject to a technical assumption on their limit shape. We show that the edge statistics around any point on the arctic boundary, that is not a cusp or tangency location, converge to the Airy line ensemble. Our proof proceeds by locally comparing these edge statistics with those for a random tiling of a hexagon, which are well understood. To realize this comparison, we require a nearly optimal concentration estimate for the tiling height function, which we establish by exhibiting a certain Markov chain on the set of all tilings that preserves such concentration estimates under its dynamics.