The competitive impacts of vertical mergers are a long-standing question in antitrust economics. A recent wave of vertical mergers has reinvigorated the academic and policy debate on enforcement, and the discussion is far from settled. An example of this is that US antitrust authorities presented new vertical merger guidelines in 2020, but the Federal Trade […]
Minimum Wages and Racial Inequality
Last summer’s mass mobilization for racial justice sparked debates around how to combat entrenched racial inequality in the United States. Recent corporate diversity initiatives, while a step in the right direction, are not sufficient to topple structural racism in the economy. One of the most striking dimensions of inequality in the United States is the […]
US immigration: effects on wages, internal migration, and welfare
Immigration has been a central political debate in the United States for decades, in part because of public concerns about its magnitude and its composition. For example, in the early 2000s, around 1.25 million immigrants arrived each year (Card, 2009). The share of immigrants in the US working-age population increased from 10% in 1990 to […]
Kidney Exchange: An Operations Perspective
Kidney failure is a leading cause of death around the world. The best treatment is transplantation, but no country is presently able to supply all the transplants required by its patient population. In the U.S. and many other countries, most transplants today come from deceased donors. Another source of kidneys for transplantation is from healthy […]
Competitive labor markets boost wage growth
A combination of empirical facts and economic theory suggest rising employer concentration contributed to wage stagnation in industrialized economies. Economic theory shows how labor market concentration can suppress wages by reducing workers’ bargaining leverage vis-à-vis powerful employers. Empirical evidence suggests that labor markets have become more concentrated since the late 20th century, shifting from a […]
Earnings Dynamics, Changing Job Skills, and STEM careers
The US labor market is particularly dynamic for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) jobs, with new technologies proliferating throughout workplaces every year. This technological change is the engine of long-run productivity growth and rising living standards. In the shorter run, however, workers in technology-intensive occupations must constantly learn on the job, or risk becoming […]
Can Integration Change Gender Attitudes?
The research described here asks whether integration can change gender attitudes even in a traditionally male-dominated environment. One reason to ask this question is that occupational gender segregation remains high, even though women make up nearly half the labor force in most rich countries (Blau et al. 2013). This pattern may reflect preferences that differ […]
Face-to-Face Communication in Organizations
The international response to the COVID-19 pandemic has emphasised working from home, especially for office workers tasked with the generation and processing of information. Compliance has generally been very high, with most companies not just encouraging, but mandating, their employees to work from home. This has led to an emptying of city centres and financial […]
Moral Values and Voting
What roles do moral values play in election outcomes? What are the key moral frameworks that voters maintain? How do politicians appeal to these different moral frameworks? This article summarizes a recent research paper which examines these questions, by introducing a core aspect of modern moral psychology into the study of political economy. Universalist versus […]
Geography, transportation, and endogenous trade costs
Whether by sea, land, or air, trade functions through the transportation sector. Transportation is therefore central to everyday life. Surprisingly little is known, however, about how the market for transportation services interacts with the global market for goods. Recently, the delays in trade costing billions caused by both the blockage of the Suez Canal by […]
