The costliest midterm election in US history ends with a victory for Democrats—and for money in politics in general; Amazon and Apple crack down on third-party refurbishers, raising antitrust concerns; and was Amazon’s HQ2 stunt really just a “con”?
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Economic theory tells us that firms are more likely to exploit labor market power than product market power in the United States today. And it tells us that the government should devote more resources to labor market litigation than to product market litigation.
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Facebook is still open to manipulation by malicious political actors; the dialysis industry has spent over $100 million to fight a ballot measure that seeks to regulate it; AT&T does everything it promised not to do in its defense of the Time Warner merger; and can tech workers help police their own employers?
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Facebook’s failure to curb the massive disinformation campaign that preceded Jair Bolsonaro’s election victory shows that it is unable to control the dangerous consequences of its own dominance.
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A lawsuit claims that Facebook inflated video metrics to lure advertisers. Facebook denies, but it’s worth noting that it would be much easier for Facebook to defraud advertisers than for any of its predecessors in traditional media.
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Corporate executives warm up to Brazil’s far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro; the US is developing into a “plutocracy,” says former Fed chairman; Tim Cook blasts Silicon Valley’s “data-industrial complex”; and what is McKinsey’s relationship with Saudi Arabia?
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Facebook’s WhatsApp finds itself at the center of Brazil’s political upheaval; the EU is pushing ahead with its planned tax on tech platforms; Trump’s replacement for NAFTA entrenches tech monopolies; and why does Uber love economists?
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Historian and author Adam Tooze talks to ProMarket about how the financial crisis “remade” American capitalism, why the US response to the crisis was “nakedly oligopolistic,” and how Europe could have solved its own crisis if it had an organized oligopoly of its own.
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A new study by economists at Princeton University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds that while national market concentration is clearly increasing, local concentration is not. In fact, local concentration has been declining rapidly for the last 25 years when measured at the city, county, or ZIP code level.
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Brazil’s business community rallies around far-right authoritarian; Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh enters the Supreme Court; Amazon raises its minimum wage to $15 an hour; Germany expects to take antitrust action against Facebook this year; and the IRS’ pursuit of tax crimes reportedly faces collapse.
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The White House is getting ready to go after tech platforms and the EU is going after Amazon, while Louisiana’s attorney general wants to break up social media giants; new details revealed about Google’s plans to launch a censored search engine in China; and can tech moguls save legacy media?
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Google skips Congressional hearing, potentially making a “strategic mistake of virtually incalculable proportions”; Jon Kyl’s “ethical baggage”; new research finds telecom companies are slowing Internet traffic to and from YouTube and Netflix; and where do economists stand on market concentration?
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