| Carl Shapiro
Competition Policy, Mergers, Public Enforcement
In this episode Diana Moss sits down with Carl Shapiro, Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at the Haas School of Business and the Department of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, to unpack the debate over the role of antitrust and how to invigorate enforcement of the antitrust laws in the United States. In framing the dialog over where antitrust should go, they create a multi-faceted conversation that reveals why competition is a broader and important public policy issue for a market-based economy and democratic society. Major themes include the controversy over indicators of declining competition, recent changes to the antitrust ideological spectrum, proposed legislative reforms to the antitrust laws, revisions to the Horizontal Merger Guidelines, and the challenges that face the Biden antitrust chiefs at the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division and Federal Trade Commission. These threshold questions have critical implications for the effectiveness of antitrust enforcement moving forward in promoting competition and for protecting consumers and workers.
MODERATOR:
Diana Moss, President, American Antitrust Institute
GUEST:
Carl Shapiro is Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at the Haas School of Business and the Department of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He also is the Transamerica Professor of Business Strategy Emeritus at the Haas School of Business. Shapiro served as a Senate-confirmed Member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during 2011-12.
For the two years immediately prior to that, he was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economics at the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice; he also held that position during 1995-96. From 1998 to 2008, Shapiro served as Director of the Institute of Business and Economic Research at UC Berkeley. He has been Editor and Co-Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives and is co-author, with Hal R. Varian, of Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy.
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