US

How to Converge the US and European Antitrust Approaches Toward Big Tech

The growing consensus that Big Tech platforms need to be restrained creates a unique opportunity for international cooperation among antitrust enforcers. The...

The Hidden Risks of Stimulus Packages: Federal Debt Is Not a Problem – Until It Is

Most economists agree that some stimulus bill to mitigate the effect of the pandemic was a necessary evil (although they argue about how good the...

Why Mass Testing Is Crucial: the US Should Study the Veneto Model to Fight Covid-19

The Italian experience suggests that locking downtowns is a necessary but insufficient condition to stop the spread of the disease. If 50 percent of...

This Is Not the Time to Be Cautious. We Need to Contain the Economic Contagion of the Coronavirus

The real danger is that the virus mutates and infects our economic system, even as we manage to root it out of our bodies....

How to Save American Middle-Sized Businesses from the Coronavirus Supply-Chain Crisis

Congress passed an $8.3 billion spending bill to address the coronavirus epidemic, but the bill will not protect small companies. Republican Senator Marco Rubio put forward...

US Big Business vs China: How Monopolies Harm National Security

China’s goal is to concentrate power, both within China and over Western industrial commons. The best reaction is not to mimic Chinese autocratic control...

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.