December 2018

T-Mobile Takeover of Sprint Clears US National Security Panel

Apparently, T-Mobile won approval from US national-security officials for its planned takeover of Sprint, bringing the two rivals a step closer to closing their roughly $26 billion combination. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, or Cfius, told the companies that it had cleared the union of the No 3 and No 4 carriers by subscribers after several months of negotiations with company representatives.

Labor market impact of the proposed Sprint–T-Mobile merger

In this paper, we draw upon a nascent but fast-growing empirical economics literature on the earnings effect of labor market concentration to estimate how the Sprint–T-Mobile merger would affect earnings of workers at the US stores that sell the wireless services of the merging firms and their competitors. We find that the merger would reduce earnings in the affected labor markets.