Labor share
How IT Affects Firm Size, Market Concentration, and the Labor Share
Does investing in information technology (IT) enable firms to “scale without mass” and increase their market share? In a new paper, Erik Brynjolfsson, Wang Jin, and Xiupeng Wang examine how IT affects firm size, market concentration, and the labor share of revenue.
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...
The Profit Paradox: “What’s Good for Firms Is Not Necessarily Good for the Workers”
In an interview with ProMarket, Jan Eeckhout discusses his new book The Profit Paradox and explains how market power brings down wages, even if...
The Monopoly Harms That Antitrust Keeps Missing
In his new book Monopolized, journalist David Dayen tells the stories of individuals who have suffered at the hands of monopolists, showing the myriad...
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...
Banning Noncompete Agreements Benefits Low-Wage Workers
Examining the effects of a 2008 ban on noncompete agreements for low-wage workers in Oregon, a recent paper finds that the ban increased average...
The Lousy Job Economy: Young People Bear the Brunt of a Long-Term Decline in American Job Quality
A new study finds a steady decline in the quality of American jobs between 1979 to 2017, even as GDP has grown. This decline...
The Limits of Private Action: What the Past 40 Years Taught Us About the Perils of Unregulated Markets
The two big ideas that animated American public policy since the end of World War II, employer-sponsored social benefits and neoliberalism, are failures. We...
Global Declining Competition
Studies of the evolution of market power since 2000 have focused mostly on publicly traded US firms. This column introduces a new global study...
Regulators Should Not Change the Regulatory Environment to Include Labor Market Concentration
Research has shown that labor markets with higher levels of labor market concentration have lower wages. It does not necessarily follow that regulators should...
