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 hourly workers’ wages by up to 6 percent.
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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 has been particularly severe for young workers and catastrophic for young workers without a college degree.
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How Robert Bork Fathered the New Gilded Age
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 Employment Effects of a Gender-Specific Minimum Wage
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 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 need better options.
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Restoring Antimonopoly Through Bright-Line Rules
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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The “Biggest Puzzle in Economics”: Why the “Superstar Economy” Lacks Any Actual Superstars
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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Rents and Inclusive Growth: A Decline in Rent Sharing Implies Growing Income Inequalities
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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Why Local Labor Market Concentration Is Lower Than It Used to Be, Even As National Concentration Increases
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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