Labor
How Antitrust Can Better Regulate Thin Labor Markets
Thin markets, characterized by a small number of participants and low transaction volumes, create particular problems for antitrust enforcers. Hiba Hafiz explores the incoherent,...
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?
A Biden administration report, published...
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 finds that...
How the Rise of Labor Market Power Helps Explain the Fall of US Manufacturing Employment
A new working paper explores the increase in labor market power in the US and what’s driving it. It shows manufacturing workers were paid...
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 tumultuous history...
The Ties that Bind Workers to Firms: No-Poach Agreements, Noncompetes, and Other Ways Firms Create and Exercise Labor Market Power
Collusive no-poach agreements are per se illegal, but noncompete clauses are not. Recent research casts doubt on the rationale for this legal distinction and...
Antitrust Should Be Used as a Targeted Response to Employer Concentration, But It Can’t Do Everything
A large and growing body of research demonstrates that employer concentration affects the wages of many American workers. Antitrust is an important tool in...
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...
