Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Law
Market Power In The U.S. Economy Today, Jonathan Baker
Market Power In The U.S. Economy Today, Jonathan Baker
Presentations
Market concentration measures the extent to which market shares are concentrated between a small number of firms. It is often taken as a proxy for the intensity of competition. Indeed, in recent years changes in concentration have increasingly been used to argue that the intensity of competition is falling, that the growth of large firms with high market shares is driving up profits, damaging innovation and productivity, and increasing inequality. Some have argued that the competition rules need to be rewritten and a crackdown by overly antitrust agencies is required. The simplicity of this framing has found supporters across the …
Overlapping Financial Investor Ownership, Market Power, And Antitrust Enforcement: My Qualified Agreement With Professor Elhauge, Jonathan Baker
Overlapping Financial Investor Ownership, Market Power, And Antitrust Enforcement: My Qualified Agreement With Professor Elhauge, Jonathan Baker
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
As is well known among financial economists but not previously recognized within the antitrust community, large and diversified institutional investors such as BlackRock, Fidelity, State Street, and Vanguard collectively own roughly two-thirds of the shares of publicly traded U.S. firms overall, up from about one-third in 1980. Recent economic research involving airlines and banking raises the possibility that overlapping ownership of horizontal rivals by diversified financial institutions facilitates anticompetitive conduct throughout the economy, and that the problem has been growing for decades, unnoticed until now. This response to an article by Professor Einer Elhauge, explains why it may be more …
Antitrust, Competition Policy, An Inequality, Jonathan Baker, Steven Salop
Antitrust, Competition Policy, An Inequality, Jonathan Baker, Steven Salop
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
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, leaving the median household less well off. The serious economic, political and moral issues raised by inequality can be addressed through a panoply of public policies including competition policy, the focus of this article. The article describes the channels through which market power contributes to inequality, and sets forth a range of possible antitrust policy …
The Role Of Market Definition In Unilateral Effects Analysis And In The Litigation Of Unilateral Effects Cases, Jonathan Baker, Kathryn Fenton, Richard Parker, Daniel Wall, Jeffrey Schmidt
The Role Of Market Definition In Unilateral Effects Analysis And In The Litigation Of Unilateral Effects Cases, Jonathan Baker, Kathryn Fenton, Richard Parker, Daniel Wall, Jeffrey Schmidt
Presentations
The Federal Trade Commission is planning to host a public workshop on February 12, 2008 to examine the application of unilateral effects theory to mergers of firms that sell competing, but differentiated products. ”Unilateral effects” as a formal theory of competitive harm was added to the joint FTC/DOJ Horizontal Merger Guidelines in 1992. The theory recognizes that, in some instances, mergers may create or enhance market power by allowing the merged firm to profitably raise prices, without accommodation of other rival market incumbents. While section 2.2 of the Guidelines explains that unilateral competitive effects can arise in a variety of …
Economic Evidence In Antitrust: Defining Markets And Measuring Market Power In Paolo Buccirossi, Jonathan Baker, Timothy Bresnahan
Economic Evidence In Antitrust: Defining Markets And Measuring Market Power In Paolo Buccirossi, Jonathan Baker, Timothy Bresnahan
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
This paper addresses an important aspect of the interdisciplinary collaboration between law and economics: the use antitrust courts can and should make of empirical industrial organization economics, in light of the expansion of empirical knowledge generated during the last few decades. First we show how courts can apply what economists have learned about identification of alternative theories of industry structure and firm strategy to the problems of defining markets and determining whether market power has been exercised. We emphasize that the same analytic issues arise regardless of whether the evidence on these concepts is quantitative or qualitative. Second we show …
Policy Watch: Developments In Antitrust Economics, Jonathan Baker
Policy Watch: Developments In Antitrust Economics, Jonathan Baker
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
During the late 1970s and 1980s, the federal courts transformed antitrust rules and the federal enforcement agencies altered their case selection criteria in response to theories developed by industrial organization economists. These developments in economic thinking, often associated with the Chicago school, led current antitrust law and practice toward a greater skepticism about the relationship between market concentration and market power and a greater recognition of the possible efficiency-enhancing role of vertical agreements (contracts between firms and their customers or suppliers) than was present in the 1950s and 1960s.This survey will begin where those developments leave off by highlighting more …
Market Power And The Cross-Industry Behavior Of Prices Around A Business Cycle Trough, Jonathan Baker, Peter Woodward
Market Power And The Cross-Industry Behavior Of Prices Around A Business Cycle Trough, Jonathan Baker, Peter Woodward
Working Papers
Our paper examines the behavior of prices in a large number of highly-disaggregate industries around the trough of the business cycle. We conclude that the degree to which prices are pro- or counter-cyclical differs between business cycle peaks and business cycle troughs, and that the cyclical behavior of prices varies substantially across industries. We also observe a tendency for industry prices to rise immediately following a business cycle trough. In general, we accept a market power explanation for that observation: either oligopolists pricing above marginal cost take advantage of a cyclical tendency for demand functions to grow more inelastic in …