Labor
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
The idea that firms...
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...
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...
