Nonrival

Expert analysis from think tanks and academia, on public policy, economics, and technology.
Human experts. AI summaries.

When BlackRock Owns Your Competitors, You Have a Hidden Incentive to Replace Workers with Robots

promarket

• When competing firms share the same institutional investors (like BlackRock or Vanguard), those firms have a financial incentive to automate jobs rather than hire — because hiring drives up local wages, which hurts the co-owned competitor and ultimately the shared investor.
• Researchers found that after investor mergers created new common ownership among labor-market rivals, firms were about 9% more likely to file automation patents and saw employment growth fall by 3.8 percentage points per year — effects that disappeared when the commonly owned firms operated in separate regional labor markets.
• The findings suggest common ownership isn't just a consumer-prices problem: it may be quietly pushing firms toward labor-displacing technology for financial rather than productivity reasons, with real consequences for workers and wages.

China's Economy Is Quietly Decaying — and That's America's Best Strategic Opportunity in Decades

hoover

• China's economic miracle has stalled far more severely than official data suggests: a burst credit bubble, collapsing property markets, and shrinking tax revenues have left Beijing almost entirely dependent on export growth to keep the economy moving.
• This weakness is actually dangerous in the short term, as China increasingly weaponizes supply chains and trade threats to keep export markets open — but it also means Beijing is fighting from a position of structural decline, not rising dominance.
• The author argues the U.S. and its allies have a narrow window to invest in industrial resilience and erect targeted trade defenses that could tighten the vise on China before its export machine further hollows out Western manufacturing bases.

U.S. Sanctions on Venezuela's Oil Industry Made It Far More Polluting Per Barrel

nber

• U.S. sanctions caused Venezuela's oil production to collapse by two-thirds, but per-barrel gas flaring actually rose 2.5 times — meaning the environmental damage was far worse than a simple production decline would suggest.
• The culprit isn't just fewer wells: surviving fields ran aging infrastructure past its limits and slashed maintenance budgets, leaking far more methane and burning far more gas per barrel produced.
• The same pattern shows up in sanctioned Iran, suggesting this is a predictable side effect of oil sanctions on autocracies — one that policymakers have largely ignored.

In the News

Pennsylvania just opened the door for radioactive oil-well wastewater to be sold as a road treatment product — and it doesn't even work

the_conversation

• Pennsylvania's oil and gas wells produce brine laced with radium, a carcinogen, and for decades it was spread on roads for dust control and de-icing — a practice the state restricted in 2018, but a new 2026 permit could allow it to come back commercially.
• Penn State researchers who tested the brine found it no better than rainwater at suppressing dust, causes roads to degrade faster, and washes radioactive contaminants into streams and sediments — meaning it fails at its stated purpose while posing real health risks.
• Under current rules, there's no requirement to measure radium levels or disclose to buyers that a road-treatment product comes from oil and gas brine; a state House bill banning the practice passed committee in June 2026 but has no floor vote scheduled.

Analysis

Satellite data reveals Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries are causing lasting local economic damage that Moscow can't hide

voxeu

• Using NASA nighttime light data instead of Russian official statistics, researchers found that verified Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries caused a 15–30% drop in local economic activity that persisted for over a year.
• The damage is spatially concentrated near the refineries rather than spread across broader regions, suggesting genuine industrial disruption rather than a wider economic shock — and it doesn't show up around other types of strike targets.
• The findings demonstrate both that Ukraine's refinery campaign is inflicting meaningful economic costs and that satellite imagery can pierce the information blackout around economic damage in authoritarian states.

Also Worth a Look

• AI Is Starving Websites of Traffic — Here's One Plan to Make the Bots Pay for What They Take (yale_som)
• AI-Powered Lending Can Boost Bank Profits — But at the Cost of Excluding Women and the Poor (nber)
• ESG Investing May Actually Be Making Polluters Worse, Not Better (nber)
• China's Dominance in Low-Skill Manufacturing Is Blocking Poorer Countries From the Ladder Out of Poverty (hoover)
• Labour shortages drove Britain's Industrial Revolution — and today's worker scarcity could do the same (voxeu)
• Flood Risk Disclosure Lowers Home Prices — and Shifts the Risk Onto Poorer Buyers (nber)
• Your Credit Score Can Actually Cause You to Default — Not Just Predict It (nber)