Labor market concentration
How Workers Adapt to the Threat of Local Employer Exploitation
In two recent papers, Matthew E. Kahn and Joseph Tracy examine the outcomes of local labor markets affected by monopsony power. They find that in areas with a high degree of monopsony power, workers earn lower wages but are compensated with lower house prices, at the expense of homeowners. Monopsony markets also experience a “brain drain” over time due to young, educated workers who leave for better opportunities. The rise of work-from-home may accelerate this dynamic by allowing talent to change labor markets without changing residences.
How Antitrust Can Better Regulate Thin Labor Markets
Thin markets, characterized by a small number of participants and low transaction volumes, create particular problems for antitrust enforcers. Hiba Hafiz explores the incoherent,...
How Practical Are Biden’s Proposals to Promote Labor Market Competition?
A new report from the Biden administration lays out ways to increase competition in US labor markets. Will they work?
A Biden administration report, published...
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...
Why a “Whole-of-Government” Approach is the Solution to Antitrust’s Current Labor Problem
For the majority of America’s regulatory history, the problem of employer monopsony was understood as a competition policy issue that required direct government-wide labor...
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...
Antitrust Law’s Current Stance Toward Workers Violates Its Original Purpose to Balance Power With Powerful Firms
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...
