Labor Unions
How Practical Are Biden’s Proposals to Promote Labor Market Competition?
A new report from the Biden administration lays out ways to increase competition in US labor markets. Will they work?
How Manufacturing’s Lobby Won and Lost its Political Influence
What happens when supporting capitalism hurts capitalists? Do business lobbies ever control the economy to the extent we think they do? The...
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...
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...
Do Employees Benefit From Worker Representation on Corporate Boards?
Mandated legislation of worker representation is unlikely to be the magic bullet some policy-makers have pictured. A new paper finds workers may...
More and More Employers Are Spying on Workers Online. Federal Regulators Are Okay With It
Employers today have numerous tools at their disposal to monitor workers’ behavior and communications. Outdated federal regulations and an administration that prioritizes...
Antitrust Law’s Current Stance Toward Workers Violates Its Original Purpose to Balance Power With Powerful Firms
Antitrust law’s present-day bias against democratic cooperation and in favor of top-down corporate control has contributed more broadly to the institutional weakness and perceived...
Antitrust’s Monopsony Problem
Four cases from the past decade alleging employer collusion against workers show that at present, antitrust law is ill-equipped to protect workers. A root...
Banning Noncompete Agreements Benefits Low-Wage Workers
Examining the effects of a 2008 ban on noncompete agreements for low-wage workers in Oregon, a recent paper finds that the ban increased average...
The Lousy Job Economy: Young People Bear the Brunt of a Long-Term Decline in American Job Quality
A new study finds a steady decline in the quality of American jobs between 1979 to 2017, even as GDP has grown. This decline...
LATEST NEWS
Antitrust and Competition
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.
Antitrust and Competition
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.
Antitrust and Competition
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.
Economic History
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.
Antitrust and Competition
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.
