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...

Why would anyone want to use antitrust law as a wealth distribution device when far more explicit statutory tools are available for that purpose? One feature of antitrust is its open-textured, nonspecific statutes that are interpreted by judges. As a result, using antitrust to redistribute...

Two recent papers by prominent antitrust scholars argue that a revived antitrust movement can help reverse the dramatic rise in economic inequality and the erosion of political democracy in the United States. Both papers rely on the legislative history of the key antitrust statutes to support...

A central motivating factor for studying price markups is their effect on consumer welfare. Reported estimates of (firm-level) price markups in the literature, however, are often focused on industry or cross-country comparisons. These treat different industries equally rather than based on how...

Economic inequality recently has entered the political discourse in a highly visible way. This political impact is not a surprise. As the U.S. economy has begun to recover from the Great Recession since mid-2009, economic growth has effectively been appropriated by those already well off,...

In recent years, progressive public intellectuals and prominent scholars have asserted that monopoly power lies at the root of wealth inequality and that increases in antitrust enforcement are necessary to stem its rising tide. This claim is misguided. Exercises of market power have complex,...

This paper investigates the relationship between democracy and antitrust policy. Strong antitrust policies advance the economic and political interests of most citizens, making their adoption more likely in institutional settings that weigh the interests of consumers. We examine the empirical...

Some policies drive economic growth, some act to redistribute income or wealth; however, it is rare to find policy instruments that do both. Investment in improving skills and education may fall into that category. New research from the OECD suggests that competition can also help governments to...