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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How the FTC Protects Strong Employers and Targets Weak Workers
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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Why the FTC Should Focus on Labor Monopsony
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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70 Years of US Corporate Profits
A new Stigler Center working paper shows that after decades of decline, profits started increasing in the early 1980s.
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Can Credit Tightening Spur Social Unrest? Evidence from 1930s China
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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Glen Weyl: “The Very Structure of Capitalism Is Inherently Monopolistic”
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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Data Workers of the World, Unite!
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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Do Firms Use Capital and Labor Efficiently? Evidence and Implications of Resource Misallocation
Economists have for a decade or so theorized that moving productive inputs like labor and capital into the firms that make the best use of them is a prime engine of economic growth. But measuring how well this allocation is taking place across economies is a daunting empirical task. Nonetheless, a new Stigler Center working paper by Lenzu and Manaresi tries to do precisely that.
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Strong Employers and Weak Employees: Study Sheds New Light on How Labor Market Concentration Hurts Workers
New study finds that wages are significantly lower in concentrated labor markets—and even lower in labor markets where unionization rates are low.
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To Help Workers Adjust to Technological Change, First Pinpoint Where It Is Happening
Changes in technology clearly affect people in different sectors and occupations differently, but providing adequate policy support to workers trying to adjust to these changes requires a better understanding of the level at which productivity growth is happening in the economy. Here, the researchers find that, in the United States, the vast majority of that growth has happened at the occupational and sector-occupational level.
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New Study Shows Just How Bad the US Labor Market’s Competition Problem Really Is
In recent decades, antitrust policy has all but ignored the issue of monopsony power. Yet a new paper shows that across the US economy, labor markets are highly concentrated and that this concentration is also correlated to lower wages, suggesting that employers are indeed exercising monopsony power and driving down pay.
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Editors’ Briefing: On Our Radar This Week (Jan. 29–Feb. 2)
This week in political economy.
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