Antitrust and Competition

What Economists Mean When They Say “Consumer Welfare Standard”

Though coined by academic economists, the term “consumer welfare standard” has been captured and changed by the economic school of thought known as the...

Global vs. Local: What Drives Changes in Labor’s Share of Income

A new working paper examines the relationship between competition policy and the decline in the labor share across the developed world and finds that...

How Big Media Handed Digital Advertising to Big Tech

The current structure of digital advertising markets makes the Google-Facebook duopoly an unavoidable trading partner for every party in the content consumption supply chain,...

Google’s Calls for DOJ Antitrust Head Jonathan Kanter’s Recusal Are Baseless

Kanter’s pre-existing commitment to aggressive antitrust enforcement, far from compromising the legitimacy of his actions, reinforces his qualifications for doing the job of Assistant...

How the Free Software and the IP Wars of the 1990s and 2000s Presaged Today’s Toxic, Concentrated Internet

How did the internet evolve from a relatively decentralized, hybrid, and democratizing space toward a concentrated, privatized environment controlled by a handful of actors?...

Countering Employer Monopsony Power With Fundamental Labor Rights

Labor policies grounded in the fundamental rights of workers can reinforce the aims of a proposed labor antitrust agenda by limiting a firm’s ability...

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 Apple Locks Out the Competition with Its Digital Key

Apple’s efforts to dominate the contactless payments market and lock up the “digital key” space pose a profound threat to consumer privacy and the...

The Dawn of Antitrust and the Egalitarian Roots of the Sherman Act

While it isn’t particularly controversial that concentrated economic power was a legislative target of the Sherman Act, when read as a corollary or even...

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...

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