Law and Economics Commons^™

Due Process In International Antitrust Enforcement: An Idea Whose Time Has Come, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

The past year has witnessed an upsurge of international interest in due process in antitrust enforcement, reflected in two new comparative studies and International Competition Network’s (ICN’s) May 2019 adoption of its Recommended Practices for Investigative Process and Framework for Competition Agency Procedures and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Competition Committee’s discussion of the Draft Recommendation on Transparency and Procedural Fairness in Competition Law Enforcement in June 2019. This article reviews those developments, traces key differences among them, and looks ahead to what comes next.

Occupational Licensing And The Limits Of Public Choice Theory, Gabriel Scheffler, Ryan Nunn

All Faculty Scholarship

Public choice theory has long been the dominant lens through which economists and other scholars have viewed occupational licensing. According to the public choice account, practitioners favor licensing because they want to reduce competition and drive up their own wages. This essay argues that the public choice account has been overstated, and that it ironically has served to distract from some of the most important harms of licensing, as well as from potential solutions. We emphasize three specific drawbacks of this account. First, it is more dismissive of legitimate threats to public health and safety than the research warrants. Second, …

Making Consumer Finance Work, Natasha Sarin

All Faculty Scholarship

The financial crisis exposed major faultlines in banking and financial markets more broadly. Policymakers responded with far-reaching regulation that created a new agency—the CFPB—and changed the structure and function of these markets.

Consumer advocates cheered reforms as welfare-enhancing, while the financial sector declared that consumers would be harmed by interventions. With a decade of data now available, this Article presents the first empirical examination of the successes and failures of the consumer finance reform agenda. Specifically, I marshal data from every zip code and bank in the United States to test the efficacy of three of the most significant post-crisis …

Anticompetitive Mergers In Labor Markets, Ioana Marinescu, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Mergers of competitors are conventionally challenged under the federal antitrust laws when they threaten to lessen competition in some product or service market in which the merging firms sell. Mergers can also injure competition in markets where the firms purchase. Although that principle is widely recognized, very few litigated cases have applied merger law to buyers. This article concerns an even more rarefied subset, and one that has barely been mentioned. Nevertheless, its implications are staggering. Some mergers may be unlawful because they injure competition in the labor market by enabling the post-merger firm anticompetitively to suppress wages or salaries. …

Hushing Contracts, David A. Hoffman, Erik Lampmann

All Faculty Scholarship

The last few years have brought a renewed appreciation of the costs of nondisclosure agreements that suppress information about sexual wrongdoing. Recently passed bills in a number of states, including New York and California, has attempted to deal with such hush contracts. But such legislation is often incomplete, and many courts and commentators continue to ask if victims of harassment can sign enforceable settlements that conceal serious, potentially metastasizing, social harms. In this Article, we argue that employing the public policy doctrine, courts ought to generally refuse to enforce hush agreements, especially those created by organizations. We restate public policy …