Antitrust in a time of populism

By Carl Shapiro. International Journal of Industrial Organization, 2018

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This article discusses how to move antitrust enforcement forward in a constructive manner during a time of widespread and growing concern over the political and economic power of large corporations in the United States. Three themes are emphasized. First, a body of economic evidence supports more vigorous merger enforcement in the United States. Tighter merger control can be achieved by utilizing the existing legal presumption against highly concentrating mergers. Second, close antitrust scrutiny is appropriate for today's largest and most powerful firms, including those in the tech sector. Proper antitrust enforcement regarding unilateral conduct by dominant firms should continue to focus on identifying specific conduct that harms customers or disrupts the competitive process. Third, while antitrust enforcement has a vital role to play in keeping markets competitive, antitrust law and antitrust institutions are ill suited to directly address concerns associated with the political power of large corporations or other public policy goals such as income inequality or job creation.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/33daa88804b9263e81c5fa293ca24730a4cc72c0

Citations in the corpus

• Diverging Trends in National and Local Concentration (2018, unknown): “…while these data do reflect the fact that large, national firms have captured an increasing share of overall revenue during the past 20 years in many of these 893 ‘industries,’ they do not, in and of themselves, indicate that the relevant local markets have become more concentrated” (Shapiro 2018).”