The DOJ and FTC clarify the role of labor market power ("monopsony") in the 2023 draft merger guidelines. The draft states in Guideline 11 that the structural presumption threshold applies to labor market concentration, while also suggesting that a stricter threshold may be warranted in labor...

The U.S. trucking industry has been calling out a shortage of truck drivers for nearly forty years, since soon after its economic deregulation in 1980. Burks and Monaco (2019) provided evidence that the overall truck driver labor market works about as well as any blue collar labor market, and...

One disputed topic in Organization and Management economics is how leadership and collusive agreements are set and maintained in industries where firms are characterised by similar technological opportunities and structures. This topic is particularly important to analyse online and digital...

Twenty years have passed since Freeman and Medoff's What Do Unions Do? This essay assesses their analysis of how unions in the U.S. private sector affect economic performance - productivity, profitability, investment, and growth. Freeman and Medoff are clearly correct that union productivity...

The Slovenian transition represents a slow but steady liberalization of constraints on competition. Using a unique longitudinal data set on all manufacturing firms in Slovenia over the period 1994-2001, this study analyzes how firm efficiency changed in response to changing competitive...

It is commonly argued that labor market institutions such as employment protection worsen an economy?s performance and particularly so, if product markets become more competitive. Empirical evidence, however, has difficulties to detect a robust negative correlation between employment protection...

We explore the impact of privatization and the entry of new firms on enterprise performance in Belarus, a transition economy in which reform and market-orientated institutional development has been limited. We hypothesize that private ownership will enhance company performance, measured in a...

Do firms employing undocumented workers have a competitive advantage? Using administrative data from the state of Georgia, this paper investigates the incidence of undocumented worker employment across firms and how it affects firm survival. Firms are found to engage in herding behavior, being...

This paper studies the effect of product market competition on the compensation packages that firms offer to their executives and in particular its impact on the sensitivity of pay to performance. To measure the effect of competition we use two different identification strategies on a panel of...