Government Economists Research Articles

“Not in the Objective Function”: Gender Equality Considerations in the work of Women Government Economists in Israel

This article examines the role of gender equality considerations in economic policy from the perspective of women economists in central economic agencies in government service in Israel. It asks whether and under what circumstances women economists promote policies aiming to reduce gender inequality or benefit women. Using qualitative research tools, the study reveals that women economists view the incorporation of gender equality into economic policy as insignificant and marginal. Gender equality is perceived as a narrow issue, specific and sectoral, while the core issues dealt with by economists are considered broad and universal. The findings are consistent with previous research claiming that placing women in influential positions does not ensure representation of gendered interests, as gender plays a secondary role to training, education, and institutional context. The findings indicate that the claim of neutrality in diverse aspects of economics limits women economists’ activity and thwarts unfettered thinking on economic policy. HIGHLIGHTS In Israel, gender plays a marginal role in women economists’ policymaking. Spaces for training and learning in economics remain fundamentally gender biased. Neutrality perception limits critical feminist thinking on economic policy. Including feminist perspectives in economic education is vital.

Climate change mitigation scenario databases should incorporate more non-IAM pathways

Ajay Gambhir is a senior research fellow at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London. His research focuses on climate change mitigation, including integrated assessment modeling, national and sectoral energy modeling, and rural electrification. He also researches low-carbon technology innovation and cost-reduction processes, as well as just transitions and climate change mitigation co-benefits. Before becoming an academic, he was a UK government economist and policy analyst, during which time he worked on the UK Climate Change Act and the development of the UK’s carbon budgets. He holds a PhD in energy economics from Imperial College London. Gaurav Ganguly is the Chief Economist for Europe and the Middle East and the Head of the Climate Scenario Group at Moodys Analytics. He specializes in creating macroeconomic scenarios that explain the transmission of a range of risks such as climate change, geopolitics, deglobalization, and fiscal and monetary policy. He has been a fellow at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London where he developed a framework for using climate scenarios within financial institutions. He holds a DPhil in economics from the University of Oxford. Shivika Mittal is a research fellow at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, with eight years’ experience working on climate change mitigation. Her work focuses on assessing low-carbon pathways at global, regional, and national levels using integrated assessment models, as well as national and sectoral energy models. She was a contributing author on the low-carbon transport chapter of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report on mitigation of climate change. She holds a PhD in integrated assessment modeling from the Public Systems Group at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India. Ajay Gambhir is a senior research fellow at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London. His research focuses on climate change mitigation, including integrated assessment modeling, national and sectoral energy modeling, and rural electrification. He also researches low-carbon technology innovation and cost-reduction processes, as well as just transitions and climate change mitigation co-benefits. Before becoming an academic, he was a UK government economist and policy analyst, during which time he worked on the UK Climate Change Act and the development of the UK’s carbon budgets. He holds a PhD in energy economics from Imperial College London. Gaurav Ganguly is the Chief Economist for Europe and the Middle East and the Head of the Climate Scenario Group at Moodys Analytics. He specializes in creating macroeconomic scenarios that explain the transmission of a range of risks such as climate change, geopolitics, deglobalization, and fiscal and monetary policy. He has been a fellow at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London where he developed a framework for using climate scenarios within financial institutions. He holds a DPhil in economics from the University of Oxford. Shivika Mittal is a research fellow at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, with eight years’ experience working on climate change mitigation. Her work focuses on assessing low-carbon pathways at global, regional, and national levels using integrated assessment models, as well as national and sectoral energy models. She was a contributing author on the low-carbon transport chapter of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report on mitigation of climate change. She holds a PhD in integrated assessment modeling from the Public Systems Group at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India.

Acknowledgments

Previous articleNext article FreeAcknowledgmentsRobert A. MoffittRobert A. MoffittJohns Hopkins University and NBER, United States of America Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis issue of the NBER’s Tax Policy and the Economy journal series contains revised versions of papers presented at a virtual conference on September 23, 2021. The papers continue the journal’s tradition of bringing high-quality, policy-relevant research by NBER researchers to an audience of economists in government and in policy positions in Washington and to economists around the country with interests in policy-oriented economic research. The papers in this issue are wide-ranging and diverse, from whether tax policy should be rethought in a time of low interest rates to how to score capital gains reforms to the design of a child allowance in the United States, to whether corporate tax cuts increase inequality and whether federal support to schools in the COVID-19 recession was well targeted.I would like to thank Rob Shannon of the NBER for his usual expertise and organizational acumen in overseeing the logistical details, invitations, and operational aspects of the conference and to Jim Poterba for his continued assistance with the organization of the meeting. I would also like to thank Helena Fitz-Patrick for assistance in many other aspects of the conference, especially the shepherding of the papers toward final publication. And I would like to acknowledge the continued financial support of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Finally, let me express my thanks to the authors themselves for the hard work they devoted to producing high-quality papers living up to the Tax Policy and the Economy standard. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Tax Policy and the Economy Volume 362022 Sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/718954 Views: 250 © 2022 National Bureau of Economic Research. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Employment and Earnings for Federal Government Economists: Empirical Evidence by Gender and Race

We contribute to the literature on diversity in the economics profession, which has mostly focused on academia, by providing a first look at the employment and earnings of federal government economists by gender and race. Combining micro-level data on federal workers with information on their earnings in federal and private sector jobs, we examine the share of federal government economists by race and gender, earnings differences by race and gender, and whether earning gaps differ during their federal government tenure.

Acknowledgments

Previous articleNext article FreeAcknowledgmentsRobert A. MoffittRobert A. MoffittJohns Hopkins University and NBER Search for more articles by this author Johns Hopkins University and NBERPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis issue of NBER’s Tax Policy and the Economy journal series contains revised versions of papers presented at a conference at the National Press Club on September 27, 2018. The papers continue the journal’s tradition of bringing high-quality, policy-relevant research by NBER researchers to an audience of economists in government and in policy positions in Washington and to economists around the country with interests in policy-oriented economic research. The papers in this issue are wide-ranging, from the effects of future announced sales taxes on current car sales, to what firms said they would do in response to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, to the distributional effects of moving to independent taxation.The attendees at the conference were also lucky to hear an interesting lunch presentation by Vitor Gaspar, director of the Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who discussed the issues currently confronting the fiscal policies of IMF member countries.I would like to thank Rob Shannon of NBER for his usual expertise and organizational acumen in overseeing the logistical details, invitations, and operational aspects of the conference and to Jim Poterba for his continued assistance with the organization of the meeting. I would also like to thank Helena Fitz-Patrick for assistance with many other aspects of the conference, especially the shepherding of the papers toward final publication. And I would like to acknowledge the continued financial support of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Finally, let me express my thanks to the authors themselves for the hard work they devoted to producing high-quality papers living up to the Tax Policy and the Economy standard. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Tax Policy and the Economy Volume 332019 Sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/703232 Views: 66Total views on this site © 2019 by the National Bureau of Economic Research. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Charles Wickens: The Australian Government’s First Economist

The contribution of Charles Wickens to Australian economics has been overlooked for too long. As well as his distinguished service as Commonwealth Statistician, and high reputation as an actuary, he was a key economic adviser to government for many years. He was effectively the first Australian government economist. He was the man to whom other public servants turned with economic problems. Along with Douglas Copland, he had a major role in the establishment of the Economic Society. He was a major contributor to its journal, the Economic Record. He challenged the then economic orthodoxy, giving proto-Keynesian advice on responding to the great depression, which influenced the plan developed by Ted Theodore. He chaired the committee of Australian economists which produced a globally significant report on tariffs. He did pioneering work on estimating a national balance sheet for Australia and in other areas of economics. He should be better remembered.

Theoretical and empirical approaches to quantitatively valuing research

This article provides historical narratives describing approaches to studying, managing, and quantitatively valuing research; methods used by industry, particularly the pharmaceutical industry and approaches taken by economists, including government economists using the Leontief Input–Output framework. The article documents the persistent belief that research expenditures generate future economic value along with the equally persistent frustrations of attempting to measure such value, particularly for basic research. The article then discusses the results of applying the Leontief method to Association of University Technology Manager (AUTM) data. Strengths and weaknesses of these approaches are noted. Additional studies and calls for data capture are suggested and the potential benefits of such efforts are described.

Acknowledgments

Previous articleNext article FreeAcknowledgmentsRobert A. MoffittRobert A. MoffittJohns Hopkins University and NBER Search for more articles by this author Johns Hopkins University and NBERPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis issue of the NBER’s Tax Policy and the Economy journal series contains revised versions of papers presented at a conference at the National Press Club on September 14, 2017. The papers continue the journal’s tradition of bringing high-quality, policy-relevant research by NBER researchers to an audience of economists in government and in policy positions in Washington and to economists around the country with interests in policy-oriented economic research. The papers in this issue are wide-ranging, from tax issues in online education to the economics of disability transfers to normative issues in optimal taxation when biased responses are present.The attendees at the conference were also lucky to hear an interesting lunch presentation by Katherine Abraham of the University of Maryland and NBER, who spoke on the recently released Report of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policy-Making, of which she was co-chair.I would like to thank Rob Shannon of NBER for his usual expertise and organizational acumen in overseeing the logistical details, invitations, and operational aspects of the conference and to Jim Poterba for his continued assistance with the organization of the meeting. I would also like to thank Helena Fitz-Patrick for assistance in many other aspects of the conference, especially the shepherding of the papers toward final publication. I would like to acknowledge the continued financial support of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Finally, let me express my thanks to the authors themselves for the hard work they devoted to producing high-quality papers living up to the Tax Policy and Economy standard. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Tax Policy and the Economy Volume 32, Number 12018 Sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/697143 © 2018 by the National Bureau of Economic Research. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Federal Home Loan Bank System: A Bibliography

This is an unannotated bibliography of writings through 2016 primarily about the Federal Home Loan Bank System (FHLBS), but it also includes materials regarding the savings and loan (S&L) industry. While it is comprehensive, it is not exhaustive, with a focus on work published by government agencies, economists, legal and policy scholars, private sector analysts and think tanks. The bibliography also includes other materials about the housing finance market in the 19th and early 20th Century. These materials provide some context for the operations of the FHLBS and the S&L industry. This bibliography will be posted on Wikipedia so that others can make additions to it. The text of this page and the attached downloadable document are available for modification and reuse under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts).

Should TPP Be Formed? On the Potential Economic, Governance, and Conflict-Reducing Impacts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)Comprehensive are the most distinctive aspect of the TPP. (Petri and Plummer (2016), p. 5)I. INTRODUCTIONThe proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a free trade agreement (FTA) among 12 Pacific Rim countries whose joint gross domestic products (GDPs) account for approximately 36 percent of world GDP and whose mutual trade accounts for approximately 24 percent of world trade. For the United States, the 11 potential TPP partners already account for 45 percent of U.S. exports.1 Moreover, the United States already has in place FTAs with 6 of these 11 countries.2 Other TPP countries also have FTAs in place with several countries. Hence, TPP is designed to expand trade-policy liberalization among a larger number of countries, to deepen the degree of trade-policy liberalization by lowering non-tariff trade barriers and other fixed trade costs (including liberalizing trade in services and lowering foreign direct investment (FDI) barriers), and to improve harmonization of trade and FDI policies. The likely most substantive contribution of the TPP is to reduce an overwhelming array offixed costs that firms face in exporting goods and services to foreign markets. The comprehensive rules noted above in Petri and Plummer (2016) should reduce such export fixed costs. In other words, in stark contrast to most previous FTAs, the TPP is unique and unprecedented in two dimensions. First, the TPP will improve the of international trade and FDI to allow all countries' firms to trade on a fairer and more transparent footing. Second, by lowering variable and fixed trade costs, the TPP will enable a greater number of firms to export to foreign markets.Prior to any new FTA formation, academic, business, and government economists typically conduct ex ante computable general equilibrium (CGE) analyses of the (expected) economic benefits and costs to nations' trade, employment, and real gross domestic products (GDPs) and national incomes. Such models provide quantitative predictions of the effects of an agreement, typically using multi-sector, multi-country frameworks with factors of production (such as labor) adjusting between industries (and some models even allow net employment increases or decreases). While several such CGE models have been implemented for TPP and their predictions summarized and contrasted,3 two prominent CGE analyses are those by Petri and Plummer (2016) and the U.S. International Trade Commission, ITC (2016). Petri and Plummer (2016) is an updated version of Petri, Plummer, and Zhai (2011) and suggests that annual exports of the United States would increase by about 9 percent from TPP (by year 2030, relative to the baseline), while annual U.S. real GDP would increase 0.5 percent (in their analysis, employment is unchanged, assuming full employment). In contrast, ITC (2016), a study mandated by the U.S. Trade Priorities Act following President Obama's notification, used a CGE model and found-under some different, and more traditional, assumptions-that annual U.S. exports to the world would grow only 1 percent (though by 5.6 percent with TPP members) and annual U.S. imports would grow similarly (relative to the baseline). ITC (2016) also predicted that U.S. real GDP would increase only 0.2 percent, which is 40 percent of the 0.5 percent impact in the Petri and Plummer (2016) study.4 While many observers claim that such impacts are small (cf., Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2016), in this era of annual real GDP growth rates among developed countries of 2 percent, additional annual growth of 0.2-0.5 percent is substantive and should not be discounted.5This paper-intended to complement these studies-examines the potential impacts of TPP beyond traditional CGE estimates, taking a broader economic, governance, and historical perspective. We do this by bringing to the fore five issues that traditional CGE models ignore; consequently, we will argue that traditional predicted CGE estimates of the trade and real income effects of TPP, such as those in ITC (2016), should be interpreted as a likely floor in terms of potential benefits. …

John H. Jackson, the Law and Economics

Before and after World War II, trade policy was largely dealt with, and shaped by, the communities of government economists and diplomats. Lawyers were hardly involved or in the lead. John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White coined the Bretton Woods institutions. Clair Wilcox was instrumental in creating the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and Joseph Viner influential in the early years of the GATT. All were economists. Harry L. Hopkins, the father of New Deal and senior adviser to President Roosevelt, entered social work and government after college. In 1944, he coined the adage, expressing the philosophy of international cooperation, which would influence subsequent generations and legal developments so strongly: ‘Trade conflict breeds non-cooperation, suspicion, bitterness. Nations which are economic enemies are not likely to remain political friends for long.’

Resourcing War While Containing Inflation: Debate among Australia's Second World War Economists

Early in the Second World War, Australian Government economists, including Financial and Economic Committee members, agreed that taxation was central to shifting resources from consumption to war spending and containing inflation. As Australia's war effort expanded in 1941–42, all advisers accepted the need for more economic controls. Differences emerged about the desired extent of controls. Some saw controls, including rationing and price stabilisation, as an alternative to higher taxation. In these debates and in policy determination, Keynes' views were influential, as to some extent were those of Kalecki and Balogh. Other influences included the policies of Australia's allies.

Bringing Religion into Economic Policy Analysis

After a long period of economic neglect of religion, recent articles in leading economics journals have been finding that has long played a surprisingly large role in influencing levels of economic development. Moving forward in the tradition of Max Weber, these articles find that Protestantism can have a positive impact in several key respects – inculcating cultural habits of thought and behavior generally favorable to economic development, encouraging specific economically beneficial activities such as a high level of literacy in society, and promoting a higher quality of democratic governance. If further careful analysis continues to shown that can be a key factor in explaining economic outcomes, this raises a novel issue for economic policy analysis. Might an economist as economic policy advisor make a religious recommendation to a society seeking a higher level of development? This paper seeks to open the discussion by economists of this difficult issue. The author draws in part on his own past experiences as a government economist working in areas where environmental religion seemed to be having a significant role in driving economic policies and outcomes of the U.S. government. The paper was presented to the annual meeting of the Society of Government Economists in Washington, D.C. in November 2013.

Crucial Controversies in Surgery

Crucial Controversies in Surgery

Recessions and Human Misery: Dating the Cycle

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) decides the peak and trough dates of the business cycle. Most economists, including the government economists, accept their dates as the bible of research. Their dates do accomplish what they set out to do: they reflect the highest and lowest levels of business activity. This was the definition set by the founder of the NBER and it is very useful for many purposes. Certainly, there is a major gain if all economists use the same dates. Nevertheless, it is useful to ask a different question and use different dates for some purposes. Suppose we do not want to know the peaks and troughs of business activity, but instead we ask: How much human misery is caused by the cycle? There are many ways to answer that question, but the easiest is just to examine the duration of recessions in terms of human misery.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

THE USDA GRADUATE SCHOOL: GOVERNMENT TRAINING IN STATISTICS AND ECONOMICS, 1921–1945

The USDA Graduate School was founded in 1921 to provide statistical and economic training to the employees of the Department of Agriculture. The school did not grant degrees, but its graduate courses were accepted for credit by a significant number of universities.In subsequent years, the activities of the school grew rapidly to provide training in many different subject areas for employees from almost all federal departments. The training in statistics provided by the school was often highly advanced (instructors included Howard Tolley and, later, Edwards Deming), while the economics taught displayed an eclectic mix of standard and institutional economics. Mordecai Ezekiel taught both economics and statistics at the school, and had himself received his statistical training there. Statistics instruction in 1936 and 1937 included seminar series from R.A. Fisher and J. Neyman, and courses on the probability approach to sampling involving Lester Frankel and William Hurwitz became important after 1939. The instruction in economics was noticeably institutionalist in the period of the New Deal. Towards the end of the period considered here, the instruction in economics became narrower and more focused on agricultural economics.The activities of the school provide a basis for understanding some of the sources of the relative statistical sophistication of agricultural economists and of the statistical work done in government in the interwar period. It is noteworthy than within the USDA Graduate School, and in contrast to the Cowles Commission, statistical sophistication coexisted with an approach to economics that was not predominantly neoclassical. It also provides a light on the place of institutional economics in the training of government economists through the same time span.

Harm to Competition Under the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines

In August, 2010, the Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission issued new Guidelines for assessing horizontal mergers under the antitrust laws. These Guidelines were long awaited not merely because of the lengthy interval between them and previous Guidelines but also because enforcement policy had drifted far from the standards articulated in the previous Guidelines. The 2010 Guidelines are distinctive manly for two things. One is briefer and less detailed treatment of market delineation. The other is an expanded set of theories of harm that justify preventing mergers or reversing mergers that have already occurred. The 2010 Guidelines reflect a growing belief that in markets where product differentiation is minimal competition tends to be robust and the structural presumptions stated in previous Guidelines were too harsh. By contrast, where product differentiation is substantial the Guidelines’ approach tended to define markets too broadly, overlooking significantly anticompetitive possibilities. Under the 2010 Guidelines unilateral effects analysis relevant markets can be very small, often limited to three or four firms, and excluding some obvious substitutes. Markets in merger analysis are not defined for their own sake, however, but rather to ascertain whether a particular alteration in market structure covered by the merger provisions will be likely to facilitate a price increase. The 2010 Guidelines address four substantive merger concerns: exclusion, restraints on innovation, unilateral effects, and coordinated effects. The Guidelines have a separate section on mergers limiting “innovation and product variety,” treated mainly in the category of unilateral effects. The 2010 Guidelines are more flexible than previous Guidelines and also more catholic about the types of harms that mergers might cause and the techniques that can be used to assess them. Older Guidelines were excessively wed to methodologies that were at the forefront of applied merger analysis when they were drafted, but that tended to make the Guidelines obsolete as new methodologies became available. Not only do methodologies change, they are also specific to the situation. Further, they tend to be well developed in the literature and accessible to experts consulted by those defending a merger as well as to the government economists who employ them. To be sure, there is a tradeoff between flexibility and guidance. Often we can have more of one only by giving up some of the other, and that tradeoff is clearly present in the 2010 Guidelines.

Economic advice as a vocation: symbioses of scientific and political authority

Academic economists perform an important function in advising politicians and state bureaucrats, lending them epistemological authority. This creates a challenge of institutional design and of professional vocation, of how these experts can combine their commitment to scientific analysis with their commitment towards their governmental patrons. This article examines the case of anti-trust economics, in which government economists are encouraged to remain as academically engaged as possible, so that their advice will be - or appear to be - unpolluted by political or bureaucratic pressures. Yet this ideal is constantly compromised by the fact that the economists are nevertheless government employees, working beneath lawyers. Max Weber's concept of a 'vocation' is adopted to explore this tension, and his two lectures, 'Science as a Vocation' and 'Politics as a Vocation' are read side by side, to consider this core dilemma of academic policy advisors.

Constructing a water quality 2.0 OLAP system in Taiwan

Abstract Obtaining water suitable for human consumption is an important issue in both agricultural and industrialized countries. In areas with limited water supplies, water should be carefully managed by all users instead of by only the water agency. Therefore, a water monitoring system should allow interested monitors, such as government economists, researchers and public users, to participate in managing the water quality. However, most water information is distributed in formats that are not convenient for a general holistic analysis. Moreover, interpreting the output of environmental systems involves specialized domain knowledge that is not well understood by the public. How to integrate all of the available data to provide useful knowledge and understandable conclusions to users of different backgrounds is an important issue. This paper presents a water quality 2.0 OLAP system designed for the South Water Resources Bureau (TSWRB) of Taiwan. The concept of Web 2.0 has been adopted to integrate qualified data resources. In addition, an On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) system was used to analyze data from distributed resources to increase the understanding of water quality information of non-experts. This system provides a framework for all users to collaborate in monitoring water quality and in protecting limited water resources.

Harm to Competition Under the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines

In August, 2010, the Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission issued new Guidelines for assessing the competitive effects of horizontal mergers under the antitrust laws. These Guidelines were long awaited not merely because of the lengthy interval between them and previous Guidelines but also because enforcement policy had drifted far from the standards articulated in the previous Guidelines. The 2010 Guidelines are distinctive manly for two things. One is briefer and less detailed treatment of market delineation. The other is an expanded set of theories of harm that justify preventing mergers or reversing mergers that have already occurred.The 2010 Guidelines reflect a growing belief that in markets where product differentiation is minimal competition tends to be robust and the structural presumptions stated in previous Guidelines were too harsh. By contrast, where product differentiation is substantial the Guidelines’ approach tended to define markets too broadly, overlooking significantly anticompetitive possibilities. Under the 2010 Guidelines unilateral effects analysis, relevant markets can be very small, often limited to three or four firms, and excluding some obvious substitutes. Markets in merger analysis are not defined for their own sake, however, but rather to ascertain whether a particular alteration in market structure covered by the merger provisions will be likely to facilitate a price increase.The 2010 Guidelines address four substantive merger concerns: exclusion, restraints on innovation, unilateral effects, and coordinated effects. The Guidelines have a separate section on mergers limiting “innovation and product variety,” treated mainly in the category of unilateral effects.The 2010 Guidelines are more flexible than previous Guidelines and also more catholic about the types of harms that mergers might cause and the techniques that can be used to assess them. Older Guidelines were excessively wed to methodologies that were at the forefront of applied merger analysis when they were drafted, but that tended to make the Guidelines obsolete as new methodologies became available. Not only do methodologies change, however, they are also specific to the situation. Further, they tend to be well developed in the literature and accessible to experts consulted by those defending a merger as well as to the government economists who employ them. To be sure, there is a tradeoff between flexibility and guidance. Often we can have more of one only by giving up some of the other, and that tradeoff is clearly present in the 2010 Guidelines.This paper focuses mainly on novel features of the 2010 Guidelines, including a new treatment of restraints on innovation, a greatly expanded consideration of unilateral effects and the possibility of exclusionary practices, a trimmed down and restated theory of coordinated interaction, and a de-emphasis on traditional market definition as used in antitrust analysis in favor of more direct measurement alternatives.