Inequality

Race and the Consumer Welfare Standard

The consumer welfare standard employs a collective consumer in its model when evaluating possibly anticompetitive behavior. This aggregated approach fails to recognize...

More than Economics, Ideology Determines US Voters’ Preferences for Redistribution

The US stands out among developed economies for its comparatively low level of redistribution as a percentage of GDP. Gustavo de Souza...

Thomas Piketty On Creating A More Equal Society

In this unedited podcast conversation, economist Thomas Piketty talks to Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales about the lessons from this movement toward...

Low Wages are Less Common Today and No More Persistent

Researchers find that a smaller fraction of workers today earn low wages than at any point since the early 1980s.

Do Protests Matter At All for Shifting Government Policy Around Economic Redistribution?

New research on the effectiveness of protests on government distributions provides insights into the political incentives of a country’s leadership and the...

Chart of the Week: Income Inequality Threatens Capitalism

A new survey of economists by the Initiative on Global Markets indicates that 67 percent agree or strongly agree that the rise...

Chart of the Week: Minority Underrepresentation in Local US Politics

ProMarket's first-ever Chart of the Week comes from a new paper that studies the underrepresentation gap of ethnic minorities in local US...

Global vs. Local: What Drives Changes in Labor’s Share of Income

A new working paper examines the relationship between competition policy and the decline in the labor share across the developed world and...

The Best Political Economy Books of 2021

A scholarly examination of market’s power toll on American workers, the collected works of a pioneering economic thinker, an ambitious narrative of...

Study: the Covid-19 Eviction Moratoriums Helped Reduce Food Insecurity and Mental Stress

A new study investigates the impact of 2020 Covid-19 rental eviction moratoria on the wellbeing of US households, finding that eviction moratoria...

LATEST NEWS

Merged Firms Offer Less Product Variety

In new research, Enghin Atalay, Alan Sorensen, Christopher Sullivan, and Wanjia Zhu find that mergers and acquisitions often lead to the merged firm offering less product variety than when the two firms operated pre-merger.

Revising Guideline 6 With Evidence To Establish a Structural Inference for Input Foreclosure

Vertical merger law lacks the structural presumption of horizontal merger law, which shifts the burden from the government to the merging parties to provide evidence that a merger will not produce anticompetitive effects when it is known that the merger will substantially increase market concentration. To improve Guideline 6 of the draft Merger Guidelines concerning vertical foreclosure, Steven Salop develops a three-factor criteria with which the government antitrust agencies can show an analogous structural “inference” that shifts the burden of evidence to the merging parties.

How US Antitrust Enforcement Against Xerox Promoted Innovation by Japanese Competitors

Xerox invented modern copier technology and was so successful that its brand name became a verb. In 1972, U.S. antitrust authorities charged Xerox with monopolization and eventually ordered the licensing of all its copier-related patents. As new research by Robin Mamrak shows, this antitrust intervention promoted subsequent innovation in the copier industry, but only among Japanese competitors. Nevertheless, their innovations benefited U.S. consumers.

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.