New Article: Elyse Dorsey, Income Inequality, Job Polarization, and the Redistributive Power of Antitrust, 29(4) Geo. Mason. L. Rev. (2022).
In recent years, income inequality and antitrust enforcement have been repeatedly linked in popular and policy discussions. Particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic shocked and dramatically reshaped daily lives across the world, concerns regarding economic inequality have surged. Simultaneously, as the pandemic increased global reliance upon technological tools—already the topic of significant debate regarding appropriate antitrust enforcement—and catalyzed disruptions along all manner of supply chains, created various shortages, and drove price increases, the appropriate role of antitrust laws once again reemerged as a critical topic of discussion. It was perhaps inevitable that the two phenomena would be linked in policy discussions.
Indeed, the nature of a causal link between income or wealth inequality and antitrust is longstanding, though surprisingly underexamined. Since early in the twentieth century, the U.S. Government sought to examine the supposed “intimate relation” between income distribution and monopoly power. In the decades since, this intimate relation has been invoked repeatedly.
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The goal of this Article is to understand better the capacity of antitrust law and policy to affect inequality trends and to begin the work of ascertaining its role in contributing to recent income inequality trends. It is generally agreed that individual antitrust cases have distributional effects. But the causal link between antitrust enforcement and inequality, writ large, remains underdeveloped and underexplored. There is a robust literature exploring trends in income distribution which would seem to provide ample ground for developing the relationship between inequality trends and antitrust enforcement.
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Part I summarizes the income inequality literature, to provide a more detailed basis upon which to analyze the potential effect of antitrust enforcement across the period examined. Part II describes general antitrust law and enforcement trends since 1890, setting the stage for a comparison of the trends in antitrust and those observed in income distribution. Part III explores the connection between these trends. Part IV deploys these insights to consider the redistributive power of antitrust law. The work is a first step toward a richer understanding of how antitrust law and policy might contribute to income inequality trends and, ultimately, of whether changes in law, policy, or priorities might better facilitate desired goals.