We evaluate the impact of the Washington State Attorney General's enforcement campaign against employee no-poaching clauses in franchising contracts, which unfolded from 2018 through early 2020. Implementing a staggered difference-in-differences research design using Burning Glass Technologies...

This paper presents a first attempt at understanding some of the many issues involved in the granting of an amnesty to illegal immigrants. We consider government behavior with respect to allocations on limiting infiltration (border control) and apprehending infiltrators (internal control) and...

The relationship between competition and innovation is difficult to disentangle, as exogenous variation in market structure is rare. The 1952 breakup of Germany's leading chemical company, IG Farben, represents such a disruption. After the Second World War, the Allies occupying Germany imposed...

Adam Smith alleged that secret employer collusion to reduce labor earnings is common. This paper examines an important case of such behavior: no-poach agreements through which technology companies agreed not to compete for each other’s workers. Exploiting the plausibly exogenous timing of a US...

We investigate the impact of labour market concentration on two dimensions of job quality, namely wages and job security. We leverage rich administrative linked employer-employee data from Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain in the 2010s to provide the first comparable...

We analyze an oligopolistic market where a domestic and a foreign firm are engaged in a takeover battle for a domestic competitor. Any merger or acquisition (M&A) must be approved by a welfare maximizing domestic competition agency which may or may not be prone to "economic patriotism". A...

Using data on the near-universe of online US job vacancies collected by Burning Glass Technologies in 2016, we calculate labor market concentration using the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) for each commuting zone by 6-digit SOC occupation. The average market has an HHI of 3,953, or the...

This paper presents a Schelling-type checkerboard model of residential segregation formulated as a spatial game. It shows that although every agent prefers to live in a mixed-race neighborhood, complete segregation is observed almost all of the time. A concept of tipping is rigorously defined,...

We examine the influence of guilt and trust on the performance of credence goods markets. An expert can make a promise to a consumer first, whereupon the consumer can express her trust by paying an interaction price before the expert’s provision and charging decisions. We argue that the...