Labor

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...

Antitrust’s Labor Market Problem

A series of academic studies in recent years highlighted the fact that labor markets are often highly concentrated and that employers use anticompetitive methods...

What does NCAA v. Alston Tell Us About Antitrust and Labor Markets?

The Supreme Court's recent ruling against the NCAA and in favor of student-athletes may seem narrow or trivial, but the Court's acknowledgement of the...

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...

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