After nearly two years of litigation and intense competition for the world’s top golfers, the PGA Tour and LIV Golf have agreed to create a new, as-yet-unnamed, for-profit joint entity. Most headlines about the deal have focused on the ethical and geopolitical problems that accompany the PGA’s joining forces with LIV’s sponsor, the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund. Within policy circles, the pseudo-merger has also stirred concerns regarding potential antitrust violations and harm to competition should the major golf leagues join forces as planned. The Justice Department (DOJ) has announced an investigation into the merger.

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Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), recently issued a memo claiming that certain noncompete clauses in labor contracts are illegal, on grounds that they violate employees’ right to organize and negotiate better working conditions under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

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In a world in which so-called “Big Tech” has dominated antitrust discussions for a decade or more, who would’ve guessed that golf would grab the biggest headlines? The proposed merger of the PGA Tour and LIV Golf has some major headline-grabbing potential: sports, big money, big names, 9/11, human-rights abuses, and cringeworthy public-relations attempts.

Aside from those issues, the PGA-LIV link-up also presents some important issues for antitrust enforcers.

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ICLE Academic Affiliate Keith Hylton appeared as a guest on CGTN America to discuss the growing strikes in the State of California. The full segment is embedded below.

Abstract

Faculty at American colleges and universities possess an exceptional, arguably unique, combination of job security and decision authority. In addition to the protections of academic tenure, “regular” faculty at most higher education institutions exercise significant authority over important organizational policies and decisions, including product design (curriculum) and personnel matters (appointments, promotions, and dismissals). Why some faculty — and only some faculty — should enjoy rights, privileges, and protections available to virtually no other class of employees has never been adequately explained, however. This paper identifies a source of “hold-up” peculiar to academic employment associated with the joint research and non-research responsibilities of “regular” faculty and the way the higher education market values the “academic capital” of scholars. Combining surveys of governance practices with institution-level data on faculty publication rates over the periods 1900-1940 and 1975-2014, the paper presents evidence of an association between research and faculty authority over personnel decisions consistent with (though not dispositive of) the commitment function of faculty rights and privileges posited here.

Since taking the reins of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) almost two years ago, Chair Lina Khan has sketched an agenda that appears inevitably set for rebuke before the U.S. Supreme Court. And that eventual day of reckoning has drawn closer with the high court’s opinion in Axon Enterprise v. FTC earlier this month, which will allow litigants to bring constitutional challenges to the agency’s authority years earlier than would previously have been allowed.

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More, and not just about noncompetes, but first, yes (mea culpa/s’lach lanu), more about noncompetes.

Yesterday on Truth on the Market, I provided an overview of comments filed by the International Center for Law & Economics on the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) proposed noncompete rule. In addition to ICLE’s Geoffrey Manne, Dirk Auer, Brian Albrecht, Gus Hurwitz, and myself, we were joined in our comments by 25 other leading academics and former agency officials, including former chief economists at the U.S. Justice Department’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division and a former director of the FTC’s Bureau of Economics.

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As I noted in January, the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) proposal to ban nearly all noncompete agreements raises many questions. To be sure, there are contexts—perhaps many contexts—in which noncompete agreements raise legitimate policy concerns. But there also are contexts in which they can serve a useful procompetitive function. A per se ban across all industries and occupations, as the FTC’s notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) contemplates, seems at the least overly broad, and potentially a dubious and costly policy initiative.

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