labor market

The United States healthcare system has experienced an expansion of private equity ownership. In new research, Theodosia Stavroulaki argues that private equity acquisitions risk harming healthcare by increasing prices, reducing quality of care, limiting access to care, and hurting the labor force.

In a new working paper, Magnus Lodefalk, Lydia Löthman, Michael Koch, and Erik Engberg examine how generative AI is reshaping the labor market. They find little evidence that AI has cut the total number of jobs, but show that it has slowed hiring for the youngest workers, especially in the AI-exposed occupations where young women are concentrated. Over time, AI’s effect on entry-level roles risks thinning the next generation’s ability to build the skills and networks that careers are made of. 

In new research, Christos Makridis and Andrew Johnston find that industries exposed to generative AI are seeing an increase in production, employment, and wages. However, the majority of AI-driven revenue growth is channelled back to capital as profits, rather than to workers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In an excerpt from his new book The Next Shift, University of Chicago historian Gabriel Winant explores how deindustrialization and the decline of the...

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...

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...