labor market
How Stronger Non-Compete Agreements Slow Innovation
In new research exploiting state-level changes in non-compete enforceability, Kate Reinmuth and Emma Rockall find that stronger non-competes have historically reduced innovation in the United States. These declines are driven by sharp drops in inventor mobility and knowledge spillovers, especially in young, high-growth sectors.
Swedish Workers Lose Out In M&A Even When CEOs Gain
Summary Teaser: In a new working paper, Jakob Beuschlein, Jósef Sigurdsson, and Horng Chern Wong find that workers at acquired firms in Sweden experience wage cuts. Rather than from the increased monopsony power of employers, these wage cuts are due to rent redistribution toward higher CEO pay.
Accounting for City Size, Minimum Wages Reduce Jobs Almost Everywhere
In new research, Priyaranjan Jha, Jyotsana Kala, David Neumark, and Antonio Rodriguez-Lopez find that studies arguing higher minimum wages have no employment effect—or even a positive effect—in many labor markets fail to account for how much less minimum wages matter in larger, higher-wage cities.
How Cultural Norms Help Companies Exploit Unpaid Workers
Eric Posner examines how businesses exploit cultural expectations to frame certain activities as non-work, creating a form of monopsony power that allows them to extract labor without compensation in areas ranging from college athletics to digital content creation. He argues that properly classifying these "invisible" forms of work as compensable labor would benefit society, challenging anti-commodification concerns and highlighting the law's struggle to define work in these blurred contexts.
The Fall of American Manufacturing and the Rise of Health Care
In an excerpt from his new book The Next Shift, University of Chicago historian Gabriel Winant explores how deindustrialization and the decline of the...
Antitrust and the FTC: Franchise Restraints on Worker Mobility
As currently formulated, antitrust’s rule of reason approach is not the best tool to deal with vertical noncompete agreements that limit worker mobility and...
Why a “Whole-of-Government” Approach is the Solution to Antitrust’s Current Labor Problem
For the majority of America’s regulatory history, the problem of employer monopsony was understood as a competition policy issue that required direct government-wide labor...
The Profit Paradox: “What’s Good for Firms Is Not Necessarily Good for the Workers”
In an interview with ProMarket, Jan Eeckhout discusses his new book The Profit Paradox and explains how market power brings down wages, even if...
Organized Mimicry: Employers Against the Free Market
"Despite all the rhetorical support for free markets, it turns out that employers would rather corner their market, not free it, especially their market...
How the Covid-19 Pandemic Will Affect Four Types of Labor
A tremendous shock like that of the coronavirus totally unbalances new demand for four different types of labor. The category policymakers should be...
