President Trump’s 2020 Economic Report finally confronts the issue of antitrust enforcement both in the traditional economy and in the digital one. While it criticizes the demand for more antitrust enforcement on the ground of insufficient evidence, it dismisses the conclusions of the Stigler Report on a purely a priori argument, ignoring all the evidence contained in the report.
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A close review of the court ruling that approved the $26 billion mega-merger reveals a number of mistakes in Judge Victor Marrero’s reasoning, which means there are several excellent legal arguments on which states could appeal the ruling.
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CVS is built on a dominant chain of drug stores, but it is now trying to turn itself into a “uniquely powerful platform” for delivering health care. It uses one part of the supply chain to squeeze competitors in another part of the industry.
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A new study of World Bank data finds that aid disbursement to highly aid-dependent countries coincides with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centers. According to The Economist, the World Bank refused to release the study. Afterward, its chief economist resigned. Here is the full content of the allegedly-censored paper.
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Who’s richer, a person who enjoys the comfort of modern services and technologies, or the ancient kings of a millennia ago? Comparing wealth over different ages is fraught with difficulties because we have trouble comparing wealth in different societies with structurally different features.
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In an op-ed and a white paper, Facebook’s CEO argues that “private companies should not make so many decisions alone when they touch on fundamental democratic values.” Yet he opposes any serious challenge to his company’s dominance and market power.
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Two of the three presidents in this century, George Bush and Donald Trump, initially won office by coming in second in the popular vote. The electoral college was supposed to have “a moderating influence” on the competition among candidates. It didn’t work very well.
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Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.
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According to the British Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), Facebook accounts for 75 percent of the UK’s social media market. Over the past 10 years, only three companies succeeded in obtaining at least a 5 percent market share of social media users’ time: Instagram (which Facebook bought), WhatsApp (which Facebook bought) and Snapchat (which Facebook tried and failed to buy).
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Are economists to blame for our current state of affairs? That’s the argument Binyamin Appelbaum makes in his book “The Economists’ Hour.” In this episode, Kate and Luigi debate the history of economists, the problems with economics today, and what changes could lead to a better economic future.
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Antitrust law’s present-day bias against democratic cooperation and in favor of top-down corporate control has contributed more broadly to the institutional weakness and perceived illegitimacy of workers’ collective action rights, even when those rights are grounded in labor law.
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Google controls the British search market, according to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority. Its 90 percent market share and profits from general search are protected by significant barriers to entry and expansion: economies of scale and scope, access to a large scale of query and click data and payments to Apple to have Google as the default search engine in its smartphones.
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