The Profit Paradox: How Thriving Firms Threaten the Future of Work

“A vivid, comprehensive account of the causes and consequences of the recent rise of market power written by a world-renowned expert in the field, The Profit Paradox combines deep economic insight with examples from everyday life that will captivate nonspecialist audiences as much as economists.”—Pinelopi Goldberg, Yale University, former chief economist of the World Bank Group

"Provocative, ambitious, and pitch-perfect for this moment. Eeckhout shows how the rise of mega-profitable superstar corporations makes us all poorer.”—David Autor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“Eeckhout has done groundbreaking work on the rise in prices in the economy and the dynamics of the labor market. This book is a significant contribution to the field.”—Gabriel Zucman, coauthor of The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay

“The Profit Paradox is a timely and valuable addition to the national conversation on monopolies and competition. Jan Eeckhout does a masterful job of linking long-running macroeconomic trends to the lives of individual workers and consumers. Economists have only recently understood how market power affects both. He explains how the drive for corporate profit, in combination with insufficient enforcement to prevent market power, lowers wages and working conditions and reduces opportunities for small business. The book is one of the first clear and engaging explanations of how many of the most problematic features of the modern economy are causally related.”—Fiona Scott Morton, Yale University School of Management