Recent research indicates that labor market power has contributed to wage inequality and economic stagnation. Although the antitrust laws prohibit firms from restricting competition in labor markets like in product markets, the government does little to address the labor market problem and...

The Trump administration’s efforts to weaken regulations are in tension with cost-benefit analysis, which in many cases supports those regulations or otherwise fails to support the administration’s deregulatory objectives. Rather than attempting to justify its actions as a matter of policy...

Employee covenants not to compete bar workers who leave their jobs from working for a competing employer for a period of time. The common law regards noncompetes as restraints of trade and imposes a “reasonableness” standard on them; they can also be challenged under the antitrust laws. But...

When a federal regulatory agency issues a major regulation, the agency usually must provide an analysis of the anticipated costs and monetized benefits. Yet there is a large category of regulations that has escaped such scrutiny: so-called "transfer" regulations that determine how money and...

Antitrust enforcement in the United States has declined since the 1960s. Building on several new datasets, we argue that this decline did not reflect a popular demand for weaker enforcement or any other kind of democratic sanction. The decline was engineered by unelected regulators and judges...

In its current form, antitrust law is often said to advance consumer welfare and to disregard economic inequality. But with the right priority-setting and other modest reforms, efforts to increase consumer welfare might simultaneously reduce economic inequality. Because monopoly and monopsony...

Antitrust enforcement in the United States has declined since the 1960s. We investigate the political causes of this decline by looking at who made the crucial decisions and how strong a popular mandate they had to do so. Using a novel framework to understand the determinants of regulatory and...

Horizontal collusion among employers to suppress wages has received almost no attention in the academic literature, in contrast with its more familiar cousin, product market collusion. The similar economic analysis of labor and product markets might suggest that antitrust should regulate labor...