Antitrust and labor
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...
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...
Antitrust Should Be Used as a Targeted Response to Employer Concentration, But It Can’t Do Everything
A large and growing body of research demonstrates that employer concentration affects the wages of many American workers. Antitrust is an important tool in...
Antitrust and the FTC: Franchise Restraints on Worker Mobility
As currently formulated, antitrust’s rule of reason approach is not the best tool to deal with vertical noncompete agreements that limit worker mobility and...
Antitrust’s Labor Market Problem
A series of academic studies in recent years highlighted the fact that labor markets are often highly concentrated and that employers use anticompetitive methods...
