Income Inequality

Barriers to Entry as Another Source of Top Income Inequality

A new book, The Power of Creative Destruction, explores how lobbying contributes to the increase in the top 1 percent’s share of...

What the US Can Learn From Denmark About Inequality and Social Mobility

Denmark has many generous social policies that American progressives seek to emulate. Yet Denmark also has substantial inequality of child outcomes across...

“I Wanted to Call People’s Attention to the Extent of Amazon’s Takeover of Washington”

In an interview with ProMarket, author and ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis discusses the rise of Amazon and regional inequality, the role of...

The Unequal Toll of Covid-19

A pandemic is by definition universal but while it is true that the Covid-19 outbreak has affected everyone, it has not done...

The End of the Capitalist-Worker Dichotomy and the Rise of a New Elite?

Economists typically assume that capitalists and workers are different people. A new study, however, finds that the intersection between the top decile...

Covid-19 Aggravates Existing Income, Gender, and Race Inequalities, and Further Increases Political Divisions

Seventy percent of Americans know someone who tested positive; one in five know someone who died from coronavirus, survey shows.

Angus Deaton: “There’s Something Clearly Wrong With Our Corporate System, in Which Pharmaceutical Companies Are Allowed to Kill People for Money”

In an interview with ProMarket, Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton outlined what he believes the incoming Biden administration should do: introduce price...

Antitrust as Economic Stimulus

By attacking power imbalances, competition policy can steer income to workers and independent merchants who are more inclined to spend than monopoly...

To Make a Difference, Businesses Must Have a Stake in Social Missions

Despite their promises to change the world for the better and remedy social ills, the truth is that corporations are rarely designed...

A $2.5 Trillion Question: What If Incomes Grew Like GDP Did?

Per capita GDP in the US grew 118 percent over the past 43 years. At the bottom 25th percentile, real income for...

Latest news

Revising the Merger Guidelines To Return Antitrust to a Sound Economic and Legal Foundation

The draft Merger Guidelines largely replace the consumer welfare standard of the Chicago School with the lessening of competition principle found in the 1914 Clayton Act. This shift would enable the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Antitrust Division to utilize the full extent of modern economics to respond to rising concentration and its harmful effects, writes John Kwoka.

How Anthony Downs’s Analysis Explains Rational Voters’ Preferences for Populism

In new research, Cyril Hédoin and Alexandre Chirat use the rational-choice theory of economist Anthony Downs to explain how populism rationally arises to challenge established institutions of liberal democracy.

The Impact of Large Institutional Investors on Innovation Is Not as Positive as One Might Expect

In a new paper, Bing Guo, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Anna Toldrà-Simats study how large institutional investors impact firm innovation. The authors find that large institutional investors encourage internal research and development but discourage firm acquisitions that would add patents and knowledge to their firms’ portfolios, hampering overall innovation.

The FTC Needs To Focus Arguments on Technological Transitions After High-Profile Losses

Joshua Gray and Cristian Santesteban argue that the Federal Trade Commission's focus in Meta-Within and Microsoft-Activision on narrow markets like VR fitness apps and consoles missed the boat on the real competition issue: the threat to future competition in nascent markets like VR platforms and cloud gaming.

We Need Better Research on the Relationship Between Market Power and Productivity in the Hospital Industry

Antitrust debates have largely ignored questions about the relationship between market power and productivity, and scholars have provided little guidance on the issue due to data limitations. However, data is plentiful on the hospital industry for both market power and operating costs and productivity, and researchers need to take advantage, writes David Ennis.

Debating the Draft Merger Guidelines: Transcript

On September 7, the Stigler Center hosted a webinar to discuss the draft merger guidelines. What follows is a slightly edited transcript of the event.

Holding Up the News

Meta has silenced news organizations’ social media accounts in response to Canada’s Online News Act, a law not yet in effect. Josh Braun describes the reasoning behind such legislation, its potential flaws, and how Meta, particularly Facebook, has turned the Canadian wildfire crisis into a regulatory pressure campaign.