Trade

Biden Embraces Buy America, Doubles Down on Trade Protection

Industrial policy was once so out of fashion that it was jokingly called “the policy that shall not be named.” Now it’s...

Lobbying for Globalization: How the Winners Dominate the Politics of Trade Agreements

Lobbying on free trade agreements has been dominated by a few very large firms, which experience large gains as a result of...

Chinese Antitrust 2.0: Why Is China Going After Its Big Tech?

In an interview with ProMarket, Angela Huyue Zhang, author of a new book Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism, discusses the motivations behind the recent...

Pentagon Report Points to Two Major Risks to National Security: Consolidation and Shareholder Capitalism

A Pentagon report released earlier this month warns that concentrated supply chains, offshoring, and a "business climate that has favored short-term shareholder...

Debt Monetization and Lessons from War Financing to Deal With Pandemics: A Webinar With Harold James

Princeton professors Markus Brunnermeier and historian Harold James discuss how much new debt governments will pile up in reaction to the Covid-19 economic fallout....

Global Supply Chain Disruptions: A Webinar With Penny Goldberg, Former Chief Economist of the World Bank

Princeton professor Markus Brunnermeier and Yale professor Penny Goldberg, former chief economist of the World Bank, discuss the impact of Covid-19 on international trade and...

Governments and Central Banks Have a Few Unpleasant Options to Stop the Economic Contagion

The global economy and financial markets are seriously hit by the coronavirus outbreak. Central banks can do something, but monetary policy is not enough.  A fiscal stimulus might mitigate the impact, but the record-level outstanding amount of public and private debt adds additional risk to the current perfect storm.  

With the US and China, Two Types of Capitalism Are Competing With Each Other

Capitalism’s global victory has been achieved through two different types of capitalist systems: the liberal meritocratic capitalism that has developed incrementally in the West,...

How Offshoring by Multinational Corporations Contributed to the Decline of US Manufacturing

The offshoring activities of multinational firms explain about one-third of the aggregate decline in US manufacturing employment, according to a new study.  Between 1990 and...

The Real “China Shock”: Political Fallout from Slowing Exports in China

As China’s export growth has slowed down over the past five years, workers have responded by taking to the streets with increasing frequency. The...

LATEST NEWS

Do Wealth Taxes Significantly Curb Wealth Inequality?

Politicians and governments in the United States and elsewhere have recently proposed or implemented wealth taxes to supplement revenue and reduce wealth inequality. In a new study, Samira Marti, Isabel Z. Martínez, and Florian Scheuer show how decreases in wealth taxes led to increases in wealth inequality in Switzerland, though they find that these decreases alone are not enough to explain the magnitude of widening disparities.

Merged Firms Offer Less Product Variety

In new research, Enghin Atalay, Alan Sorensen, Christopher Sullivan, and Wanjia Zhu find that mergers and acquisitions often lead to the merged firm offering less product variety than when the two firms operated pre-merger.

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.

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.

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.