scholarly journals Protecting Competition in the American Economy: Merger Control, Tech Titans, Labor Markets

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 69-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Labor Markets ◽  
The United States ◽  
Merger Control ◽  
Antitrust Enforcement ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sherman Act ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Dominant Firms ◽  
Monopsony Power ◽  
American Economy

Accumulating evidence points to the need for more vigorous antitrust enforcement in the United States in three areas. First, stricter merger control is warranted in an economy where large, highly efficient and profitable “superstar” firms account for an increasing share of economic activity. Evidence from merger retrospectives further supports the conclusion that stricter merger control is needed. Second, greater vigilance is needed to prevent dominant firms, including the tech titans, from engaging in exclusionary conduct. The systematic shrinking of the scope of the Sherman Act by the Supreme Court over the past 40 years may make this difficult. Third, greater antitrust scrutiny should be given to the monopsony power of employers in labor markets.

scholarly journals Monetary Policy and Inequality

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 006-017
Author(s):  
Alexander A. Rakviashvili ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Monetary Policy ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Banks ◽  
Distribution Of Wealth ◽  
The Past ◽  
High Propensity ◽  
Debt Market ◽  
The Impact ◽  
American Economy

The article provides a literature review of studies of the impact of monetary policy on income and wealth inequality. Based on the analysis and systematization of the articles mainly written over the past 25–30 years as well as articles written by central bank authorities, the main approaches to assessing the extent to which the Fed's actions are responsible for the growth of wealth inequality in the United States, which began in the 1970s, are identified. It was revealed that the relative unanimity of economists on this issue was replaced by significant pluralism of opinions after the crisis of 2007–2009. Among other reasons this was caused by the activity of central banks and their use of non-conventional approaches in conducting the monetary policy. In addition, the channels through which the actions of central banks affect the distribution of wealth in the economy are identified. In total, five such channels were singled out. Thus, changes in the monetary policy affect the debt market and the structure of assets and liabilities of households, while households with fixed incomes and with a high propensity to use cash are more likely to suffer losses during the expansionary monetary policy. And the fifth channel, which is less popular among the economists, the "Cantillon effect", leads to an increase in the wealth of the first recipients of the issued money at the expense of those who are farthest from the center of emission. The article provides empirical evidence of why this effect is significant for the American economy, and theoretical arguments indicating that taking the Cantillon effect into account can add certainty to studies of both monetary policy costs and institutional changes caused by rising inequality.

scholarly journals Labor Markets and Economic Inequality in the United States since the End of the 1970s

2005 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 655-673 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Schmitt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Bargaining Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Competition ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
The Past ◽  
State And Local Government ◽  
Real Value ◽  
State And Local

By most measures, the United States is the most unequal of the world's advanced capitalist economies, and inequality has increased substantially over the past 30 years. This article documents trends in the inequality of three key economic distributions—hourly earnings, annual incomes, and net wealth—and relates these developments to changes in economic and social policy over the past three decades. The primary cause of high and rising inequality is the systematic erosion of the bargaining power of lower- and middle-income workers relative to their employers, reflected in the erosion of the real value of the minimum wage, the decline in unions, widescale deregulation of industries such as airlines and trucking, the privatization and outsourcing of many state and local government activities, increasing international competition, and periods of restrictive macroeconomic policy.

Globalization, Comparative Advantage, and Europe's Double Competitive Squeeze

2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1850011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominick Salvatore
Keyword(s):  
Labor Markets ◽  
Comparative Advantage ◽  
World Economy ◽  
International Competitiveness ◽  
High Technology ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Manufactured Goods ◽  
Office Equipment

The past decade has witnessed an increasingly rapid tendency toward globalization in the world economy, and this has significantly affected the comparative advantage and international competitiveness of nations. This paper examines the effect of globalization on the comparative advantage and international competitiveness of Europe in manufactured goods as a whole, in high technology goods, and in office equipment and telecommunications during the past two decades. In particular, the paper evaluates the view that Europe is facing a serious double competitiveness squeeze – in high-technology goods from the United States and Japan and from the bottom in simpler manufactured goods from emerging developing countries, especially the Dynamic Asian Economies. This view is based on the over-regulation and rigid labor markets prevailing in most European countries. The paper shows, however, that this view is not generally correct.

scholarly journals Monopsony Power and Guest Worker Programs

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 540-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric M. Gibbons ◽  
Allie Greenman ◽  
Peter Norlander ◽  
Todd Sørensen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Market Competition ◽  
The United States ◽  
Guest Workers ◽  
Guest Worker ◽  
Full Extent ◽  
Monopsony Power ◽  
Program Data

Guest workers on visas in the United States may be unable to quit bad employers due to barriers to mobility and a lack of labor market competition. Using H-1B, H-2A, and H-2B program data, we calculate the concentration of employers in geographically defined labor markets within occupations. We find that many guest workers face moderately or highly concentrated labor markets, based on federal merger scrutiny guidelines, and that concentration generally decreases wages. For example, moving from a market with a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of zero to a market comprised of two employers lowers H-1B worker wages approximately 10%, and a pure monopsony (one employer) reduces wages by 13%. A simulation shows that wages under pure monopsony could be 47% lower, suggesting that employers do not use the full extent of their monopsony power. Enforcing wage regulations and decreasing barriers to mobility may better address issues of exploitation than antitrust scrutiny alone.

Mr. Justice White and the Rule of Reason

1951 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Dishman
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Department Of Justice ◽  
Basic Assumptions ◽  
Rule Of Reason ◽  
Sherman Act ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Antitrust Laws ◽  
The Common ◽  
Obiter Dictum ◽  
Restraint Of Trade

The “rule of reason” remains after almost forty years the most curious obiter dictum ever indulged in by the Supreme Court of the United States. Mistaken though it was in its basic assumptions, the rule nevertheless persists as the Court's standard for construing the Sherman Act. This is not to say, as some critics have said, that the rule has seriously hampered the Department of Justice in enforcing the antitrust laws. We have it on the authority of Thurman Arnold that without the rule die Sherman Act would be “unworkable … because every combination between two men in business is in some measure a restraint of trade.” The rule, he has said, “has the effect of preventing the antitrust laws from destroying the efficiency of diose combinations that are actually serving, instead of exploiting, the consumer.” The fact remains, however, that in adopting the rule the Court erred in at least two respects: first, in applying a test of reasonableness where in the early cases at least none was called for and, second, in basing that rule on a misunderstanding of the common law. For the first of its sins the Court has been scolded many times; for the second, it has received surprisingly litde criticism.

scholarly journals Forty Years of Death: The Past, Present, and Future of the Death Penalty in South Carolina (Still Arbitrary after All These Years)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Blume ◽  
Lyndsey S. Vann
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Gender Bias ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Looking Back

11 Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy 183 (2016)Forty years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States deemed constitutional new death penalty laws intended to minimize the arbitrariness which led the Court to invalidate all capital sentencing statutes four years earlier in Furman v. Georgia. Over the last four decades the Court has — time and again — attempted to regulate the “machinery of death.” Looking back over the Court’s work, many observers, including two current Supreme Court justices, have questioned whether the modern death penalty has lived up to expectations set by the Court in the 1970s or if, despite 40 years of labor, the American death penalty continues to be administered in an unconstitutionally arbitrary manner. This Article presents data from South Carolina’s forty-year experiment with capital punishment and concludes that the administration of the death penalty in that state is still riddled with error and infected with racial and gender bias. It is — in short — still arbitrary after all these years. The authors maintain that the only true cure it to abolish South Carolina’s death penalty, although they do argue that lesser steps including additional safeguards and procedure may limit, but will not eliminate, some of the arbitrariness and bias which are present in the current imposition of South Carolina’s most extreme punishment.

scholarly journals Where to buy a house in the United States amid COVID-19?

2020 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2094604
Author(s):  
Wei Zhai ◽  
Zhong-Ren Peng
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Central Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
Home Prices ◽  
The Past ◽  
Coastal Cities ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Multiple Metrics ◽  
American Economy

Home prices and rent prices in the USA have been growing steadily over the past decade. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has decimated entire sectors of the American economy, which makes the homebuying decision more intricate. We mapped multiple metrics to indicate the best place to buy a house amid COVID-19. For many counties in the central area of the USA, the price-to-rent ratio highly recommends people to buy a house, but the home prices have declined since the outbreak of COVID-19. The price-to-rent ratio and increasing home price suggest that people should not buy a home in big coastal cities under the current circumstances.

States versus Nation, and the Supreme Court

1934 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver P. Field
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Government ◽  
Federal System ◽  
National State ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Supreme Court

The Supreme Court of the United States has been as impartial an umpire in national-state disputes as one of the members of two contending teams could be expected to be. This is not to impugn the wisdom or the fairness of the Supreme Court, but it is to say that the Supreme Court has been partial to the national government during the past one hundred and forty-four years of our experience with a federal system in the United States. The states, as members of the federal system, have had to play against the umpire as well as against the national government itself. The combination has long been too much for them.

Section 2 Mangled: FTC v Qualcomm on the Duty to Deal, Price Squeezes, and Exclusive Dealing

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-353
Author(s):  
Lindsey M Edwards ◽  
Douglas H Ginsburg ◽  
Joshua D Wright
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Mobile Devices ◽  
Outer Boundary ◽  
General Rule ◽  
District Court ◽  
Antitrust Enforcement ◽  
Exclusive Dealing ◽  
Sherman Act ◽  
The Supreme Court

Abstract Judge Koh handed down a sweeping opinion in May 2019 condemning as antitrust violations many of Qualcomm’s licensing practices related to its patented chips and standard-essential technology used in mobile devices. The district court opinion significantly expands the scope of liability for refusals to deal and for non-predatory pricing, further eroding the longstanding symmetrical approach to antitrust enforcement regardless of the kind of property involved. We find three glaring errors in the district court opinion. First, the court expands the exception to the general rule permitting refusals to deal, as laid out in Aspen Skiing, well beyond the outer boundary of Section 2 by inappropriately inferring a prior course of dealing and erroneously finding a willingness to sacrifice profits. Secondly, the district court accepted a price squeeze theory—characterized by the FTC as a ‘tax’ on OEMs transacting with Qualcomm’s rivals—directly contrary to the Supreme Court’s holding in linkLine. Thirdly, the court erroneously concluded that Qualcomm’s exclusive dealing arrangements with Apple violate the Sherman Act, despite a glaring failure by the FTC to prove substantial foreclosure, contrary to modern antitrust precedent and economic theory. The district court’s inappropriate extension of antitrust liability in three separate areas of well-settled antitrust doctrine is remarkable and threatens to upend important precedent that has successfully guided business conduct for many years. Further, the remedy transforms the role of antitrust courts from adjudicators to central planners, a role for which the Trinko Court expressly stated they are ill suited. The decision invites plaintiffs to use the Sherman Act to reach conduct that has been generally shielded from antitrust liability. That invitation is ill advised and should be rejected by the Ninth Circuit, and if necessary, the Supreme Court.

Shouldn't Dead Be Dead?: The Search for a Uniform Definition of Death

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariane Lewis ◽  
Katherine Cahn-Fuller ◽  
Arthur Caplan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
Definition Of Death ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Uniform Definition ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Death By Neurologic Criteria ◽  
The Way

In 1968, the definition of death in the United States was expanded to include not just death by cardiopulmonary criteria, but also death by neurologic criteria. We explore the way the definition has been modified by the medical and legal communities over the past 50 years and address the medical, legal and ethical controversies associated with the definition at present, with a particular highlight on the Supreme Court of Nevada Case of Aden Hailu.

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