Much like in the first Gilded Age, antitrust enforcers today are hitting labor, not capital. This is thanks to Robert Bork’s radical and influential reinterpretation of antitrust law. In helping successfully rewrite antitrust, Bork left a legacy of corporate supremacy and individual powerlessness.
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The first minimum-wage laws in the history of the United States were predominantly gender-specific in that they were imposing a lower bound only on women’s earnings. In a new working paper, we identify the impact of these minimum-wage laws on the employment of American men and women.
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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 need better options.
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The “consumer welfare” approach to antimonopoly is the main contributor to the extreme and dangerous concentrations of power that Americans face today. In place of this vague, subjective, easily manipulated, and fundamentally corrupt framework, we propose a system of simple rules that is true to the original American approach to building and protecting an open and democratic society.
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A new study finds that the contribution of superstar firms to US productivity growth has decreased by more than 40 percent over the past 20 years.
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A new study looks at the long-run evolution of rent sharing between companies and workers in the UK and finds that rent sharing has significantly decreased between 2001 and 2016, particularly among companies that enjoy monopolistic markups.
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A new study compares the trends in national and local industrial concentration between 1976 and 2015, and explains why they diverged.
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Since the 1970s, the US has seen a growing power imbalance between workers and employers. This story was not inevitable, but the product of conscious legal and political choices.
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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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A new Stigler Center working paper shows that after decades of decline, profits started increasing in the early 1980s.
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In 1933 the United States launched its Silver Purchase program, which raised silver prices worldwide, drained China’s silver stock, and caused credit to Chinese firms to contract sharply. In a new paper, economists at Tilburg and Bocconi universities use the incident as a natural experiment to examine whether economic shocks can trigger labor unrest and boost support for fringe political parties.
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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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