Francis Bacon coined the famous phrase “knowledge is power.” This simple idea is used to champion pay transparency to empower women and minority workers. Advocates argue that workers don’t know what their employer is willing to pay, and more information about coworker pay allows for renegotiations, which raise up and equalize wages, especially those of […]
Organisation of Markets
We focus on research that concerns antitrust policy, economic regulation, and market design. Questions of interest include the following:
How should we regulate horizontal and/or vertical mergers? Is there a trade-off between short run market power and longer run investment incentives?
How should we respond to departures from the competitive ideal in markets; with imperfect information, that are highly concentrated, that are natural monopolies, or that generate externalities resulting from knowledge producing activities?
How should centralized markets (like health insurance exchanges, kidney exchanges, and school choice mechanisms) be organized?
What is the optimal design of auctions to procure services for the government, such as highway construction contracts, or to sell government assets, such as spectrum or mineral rights?
How can policy makers detect and deter collusion?
How should patent policy be designed?
Latest articles
The case for scaling auctions when spending on infrastructure
Project uncertainty can be costly to the contractors that do the work – a lot of their business is often centered on public works – and to the government. The extent to which contractors are exposed to risk depends not only on the project design, but also on how contracts are allocated. Contracts with […]
Violence Against Women at Work
The international #MeToo movement demonstrated the prevalence of between-colleague violence, and especially violence against women at work. Yet evidence was lacking on the impacts of workplace violence on perpetrators and victims, how these impacts may depend on power and gender differences, and the impacts on the broader firm. Our research harnesses unique Finnish administrative data […]
Informality, Consumption Taxes, and Redistribution
Rich countries achieve significant redistribution via broad-based income taxes, but the income tax base covers only a fraction of the income distribution in developing countries, due in part to enforceability constraints (Jensen, 2022). Instead, developing countries rely primarily on indirect consumption taxes to collect revenue, such as the value-added tax (VAT), which are perceived as […]
Connecting to power: How political connections can reduce innovation
Recently, researchers and policymakers have become concerned about the growing dominance of large firms, declining business dynamism, and slower productivity growth in the US and other OECD member countries (Decker et al. 2016; De Loecker and Eeckhout 2018). At the same time, political “rent-seeking” has increased (Zingales 2012; Bessen 2016). In the research we summarize […]
Auctions versus negotiations in the real world
Asset owners often need to identify and choose between potential contracting partners to monetize their asset’s value. For example, companies that are acquisition targets may have multiple potential acquirers, and research institutions looking to commercialize intellectual property often decide among several interested parties. Many land transactions also look like this. How should an owner go […]
Achieving Scale Collectively
Most firms in developing countries employ only a few workers, if any (Hsieh and Olken, 2014). A key policy concern is that their small size may prevent firms from adopting technology: technology is often embodied in large machines, and small firms might not have the scale to justify the investment. As a result, firms may […]
Fighting brands, competition, and consumers
Understanding fighting brand strategies Johnson and Myatt (2003) developed a model of competition where firms can offer products that vary in quality. They showed that an incumbent monopoly active in a high-quality segment may have an incentive to launch a product in a low-quality segment only after new entry in that segment, and not before. […]
The Long-Run Impact of Immigration on Local and Aggregate Productivity
Can increases in the size of the population raise productivity? There are ample theoretical reasons to believe that the answer to this question ought to be yes. Most theories of growth predict a positive relationship between innovation incentives and market size, and many models of international trade or development economics highlight the importance of agglomeration […]
Hospital Network Competition and Adverse Selection: Evidence from the Massachusetts Health Insurance Exchange
The Affordable Care Act is one of the most significant health reforms in a generation. In addition to covering 15 million uninsured Americans, substantially expanding government health spending, and setting off a fierce political debate, the ACA is notable for an underappreciated reason: it is a major expansion of market-based health insurance. Traditionally, health insurance […]
