Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Law
Making Rules Vs Ruling, Ramsi Woodcock
Making Rules Vs Ruling, Ramsi Woodcock
Law Faculty Popular Media
In an effort to fight inflation, the Federal Open Market Committee raised interest rates to 20% over the course of 1980 and 1981, triggering a recession that threw more than 4 million Americans, many in well-paying manufacturing jobs, out of work.
As it continues to do today, the committee met in secret and explained its rate decisions in a handful of paragraphs.
None of the millions of Americans thrown out of work—or the many businesses driven to bankruptcy—sued the FOMC. No one argued that the FOMC’s power to disrupt the American economy was an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority. No …
Antitrust Can't Tame Inequality, Let Alone Inflation, Ramsi Woodcock
Antitrust Can't Tame Inequality, Let Alone Inflation, Ramsi Woodcock
Law Faculty Popular Media
The Biden administration’s plans to take antitrust action to head off inflation are splitting progressives, with some openly rejecting the notion that monopolies are to blame for surging prices and others arguing that even if the initiative fails to tame inflation, more antitrust enforcement can only be a good thing.
What both sides should be questioning is not whether applying antitrust to inflation is too much of a good thing, but whether antitrust is good for progressives at all. Because, as I explain in a recent paper, an inconvenient truth about competition is that it breeds inequality — something economists …
Personalizing Prices To Redistribute Wealth In Antitrust And Public Utility Rate Regulation, Ramsi A. Woodcock
Personalizing Prices To Redistribute Wealth In Antitrust And Public Utility Rate Regulation, Ramsi A. Woodcock
Law Faculty Scholarly Articles
The information age is enabling firms with even small amounts of market power to personalize the prices they charge to each consumer in the market. Left to their own devices, firms will use this new power to increase profits by charging prices personalized to the maximum that each consumer is willing to pay. But government can also use the new power to personalize prices to equalize wealth—by insisting that firms personalize high prices to the rich and low prices to the poor—and most of the legal rules needed to do so are already in place. Both the antitrust laws and …