Wells Fargo is in hot water again; President Trump reportedly pushed the US Postmaster General to double the rate that Amazon pays to ship packages. Why are Google and Facebook investing half a billion dollars in journalism? And can the Senate bring back net neutrality?
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If imputed payments to labor and capital don’t add up to GDP, what should be done with the residual? New research from Chicago Booth and the University of Minnesota discusses several alternatives and articulates some puzzles that arise if one simply interprets the residual as “economic profits.”
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A whistleblower alleges fraud in the audits of Silicon Valley companies; AT&T acknowledges that hiring Michael Cohen was a “bad mistake”; new analysis finds that Amazon has not been consistent with the stated selection criteria for HQ2; and a majority of Americans back a constitutional amendment that would outlaw Citizens United. This week in political economy.
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The opening panel of the Stigler Center’s annual antitrust conference discussed the source of digital platforms’ power and what, if anything, can be done to address the numerous challenges their ability to shape opinions and outcomes present.
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In an interview with ProMarket, Glen Weyl, co-author of the wildly ambitious (and wildly controversial) new book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, talks about antitrust, data as labor, and why he thinks the free market system is not actually free. “The entire business community has been speaking with one voice in the common interest of capital as a class,” he says.
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The rise in prices of mobile services risks imposing a higher tax on most households, higher than any possible tax rebate they might receive.
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George Mason University faces controversy over its relationship with donors; the former CEO of Volkswagen is charged in relation to the company’s diesel emissions cheating scandal; and are Google and Facebook already trying to undermine Europe’s new privacy rules?
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The Committee on Internet Platforms Regulation, proposed Zingales would be comprised of academics and experts on the industry.
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It is not every day that economists can identify a market where consumers are significantly better off after large price increases. Nonetheless, a new working paper by Ellison and Ellison proposes and substantiates a model of the online market for used books that—thanks to improved buyer-seller matches made possible by new search technologies—finds exactly that.
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With solutions to the threats of digital monopolies currently looking unlikely to come from the state, law and economics scholars Eric Posner and Glen Weyl, authors of the forthcoming book Radical Markets, propose looking to the power of organized labor. A data workers’ (that is, social media users’) labor union, they argue, could help check the offenses of the digital platforms.
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Why is Europe so much more vigorous than the US when it comes to antitrust enforcement? In an interview with ProMarket, Monti, who served as the EU’s Competition Commissioner between 1999 and 2004, offers a possible explanation: American antitrust’s sensitivity to election outcomes and industry lobbying.
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In a keynote address at the Stigler Center’s Antitrust and Competition: Digital Platforms and Concentration conference, the US Department of Justice’s Assistant Attorney General said antitrust enforcers “should be open and receptive to empirical evidence that companies in digital markets may be engaging in predatory pricing or other exclusionary conduct to drive out competition and cause long-run harm to consumers” and said his own thinking on data has changed.
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