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In June 2021, a federal judge dismissed the Federal Trade Commission's first monopolization complaint against Facebook on the grounds that it did not plead sufficient facts to establish that Facebook possesses monopoly power in online social networking. The ruling highlights two contentious aspects of antitrust jurisprudence: the legal necessity of establishing a defendant's monopoly power as part of Sherman Act liability for unilateral conduct, and of establishing market power as part of liability for some forms of multi-lateral conduct, as well as the few mechanisms available to plaintiffs in both public and private enforcement to accomplish that, especially following Ohio v. American Express. This article makes two related claims: that direct evidence of market power is plentiful and should be understood as such by courts, and that exactly the direct evidence of market power that courts should consider also establishes that relevant markets on each side of tech platforms are small when properly defined, whatever defendants may say.

This article combines two relatively new subjects of antitrust scholarly interest: labor market power and corporate governance. In so doing, it speaks to a number of recent debates that have grown up both inside the scholarly antitrust literature and adjacent to it. First, this article interprets the shift in the balance of power within corporations favoring shareholders at the expense of workers, both in economic-theoretical and historical terms. Second, it lays out the role of shareholders and the common ownership channel as a vector for anticompetitive conduct arising between firms, not just within firms, thanks to profit maximization at the portfolio level rather than the firm level. Third, it evaluates the claim that employer market power has increased, relative to other current explanations for labor market trends. Fourth, it ties rising employer power in labor markets to the increasing significance of common ownership. And finally, it contends that antitrust is a suitable policy remedy to the dual problems of anticompetitive common ownership and increased employer power, provided it abandons the consumer welfare standard and instead elevates worker welfare to an equivalent juridical status.

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most widely discussed work of economics in recent history, selling millions of copies in dozens of languages. But are its analyses of inequality and economic growth on target? Where should researchers go from here in exploring the ideas Piketty pushed to the forefront of global conversation? A cast of economists and other social scientists tackle these questions in dialogue with Piketty, in what is sure to be a much-debated book in its own right. After Piketty opens with a discussion by Arthur Goldhammer, Piketty's translator into English, of the reasons for Capital's phenomenal success, followed by the published reviews of Nobel laureates Robert Solow and Paul Krugman. The rest of the book is devoted to newly commissioned essays that interrogate Piketty's arguments. Suresh Naidu and other contributors ask whether Piketty said enough about power, slavery, and the complex nature of capital. Laura Tyson and Michael Spence consider the impact of technology on inequality. Heather Boushey, Branko Milanovic, and others consider topics ranging from gender to trends in the global South. Emmanuel Saez lays out an agenda for future research on inequality, while a variety of essayists examine the book's implications for the social sciences more broadly. Piketty replies to these questions in a substantial concluding chapter. An indispensable interdisciplinary work, After Piketty does not shy away from the seemingly intractable problems that made Capital in the Twenty-First Century so compelling for so many.--

AbstractNatural resource development, both extractive (oil, gas, mining, and timber) and non‐extractive (tourism, real estate, outdoor recreation), has been found to negatively impact economic prosperity in rural America. One mechanism recently proposed for why this occurs is high levels of labor market concentration, or oligopsony. Oligopsony occurs when there are few employers within a labor market and can lead to suppressed wages and a power imbalance between employers and workers. In this paper, we test the moderating effect of labor market concentration on the relationship between natural resource development and per capita income and poverty in rural America from 2010 to 2016. By comparing results between extractive and non‐extractive development, as well as manufacturing, we show that labor market concentration attenuates the beneficial relationship observed at low levels of specialization in natural resources—particularly for extractive forms of development. Further, by finding no significant relationship between manufacturing specialization and economic prosperity, nor any moderating effect of labor market concentration in the case of manufacturing, we demonstrate that natural resource development and labor market concentration have a unique relationship with rural American economic prosperity.