Labor
Why Local Labor Market Concentration Is Lower Than It Used to Be, Even As National Concentration Increases
A new study compares the trends in national and local industrial concentration between 1976 and 2015, and explains why they diverged.
The idea that firms...
How the FTC Protects Strong Employers and Targets Weak Workers
Since the 1970s, the US has seen a growing power imbalance between workers and employers. This story was not inevitable, but the product of...
Why the FTC Should Focus on Labor Monopsony
Economic theory tells us that firms are more likely to exploit labor market power than product market power in the United States today. And...
70 Years of US Corporate Profits
A new Stigler Center working paper shows that after decades of decline, profits started increasing in the early 1980s.
Financial profit is ostensibly the...
Can Credit Tightening Spur Social Unrest? Evidence from 1930s China
In 1933 the United States launched its Silver Purchase program, which raised silver prices worldwide, drained China’s silver stock, and caused credit to Chinese...
Glen Weyl: "The Very Structure of Capitalism Is Inherently Monopolistic"
In an interview with ProMarket, Glen Weyl, co-author of the wildly ambitious (and wildly controversial) new book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a...
Data Workers of the World, Unite!
With solutions to the threats of digital monopolies currently looking unlikely to come from the state, law and economics scholars Eric Posner and Glen...
Do Firms Use Capital and Labor Efficiently? Evidence and Implications of Resource Misallocation
Economists have for a decade or so theorized that moving productive inputs like labor and capital into the firms that make the best use...
Strong Employers and Weak Employees: Study Sheds New Light on How Labor Market Concentration Hurts Workers
New study finds that wages are significantly lower in concentrated labor markets—and even lower in labor markets where unionization rates are low.
America’s decades-long wage...
To Help Workers Adjust to Technological Change, First Pinpoint Where It Is Happening
Changes in technology clearly affect people in different sectors and occupations differently, but providing adequate policy support to workers trying to adjust to these...
