These Professors Make More Than a Thousand Bucks an Hour Peddling Mega-Mergers

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ProPublica

These Professors Make More Than a Thousand Bucks an Hour Peddling Mega-Mergers

by Jesse Eisinger and Justin ElliottNovember 16, 2016

IF THE GOVERNMENT ENDS UPapproving the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger, credit won’t necessarily belong to the executives, bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists pushing for the deal. More likely, it will be due to the professors.

A serial acquirer, AT&T must persuade the government to allow every major deal. Again and again, the company has relied on economists from America’s top universities to make its case before the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission. Moonlighting for a consulting firm named Compass Lexecon, they represented AT&T when it bought Centennial, DirecTV, and Leap Wireless; and when it tried unsuccessfully to absorb T-Mobile. And now AT&T and Time Warner have hired three top Compass Lexecon economists to counter criticism that the giant deal would harm consumers and concentrate too much media power in one company.

Today, “in front of the government, in many cases the most important advocate is the economist and lawyers come second,” said James Denvir, an antitrust lawyer at Boies, Schiller.

Economists who specialize in antitrust — affiliated with Chicago, Harvard, Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley, and other prestigious universities — reshaped their field through scholarly work showing that mergers create efficiencies of scale that benefit consumers. But they reap their most lucrative paydays by lending their academic authority to mergers their corporate clients propose. Corporate lawyers hire them from Compass Lexecon and half a dozen other firms to sway the government by documenting that a merger won’t be “anti-competitive”: in other words, that it won’t raise retail prices, stifle innovation, or restrict product offerings. Their optimistic forecasts, though, often turn out to be wrong, and the mergers they champion may be hurting the economy.

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Some of the professors earn more than top partners at major law firms. Dennis Carlton, a self-effacing economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and one of Compass Lexecon’s experts on the AT&T-Time Warner merger,charges at least $1,350 an hour. In his career, he has made about $100 million, including equity stakes and non-compete payments, ProPublica estimates. Carlton has written reports or testified in favor of dozens of mergers, including those between AT&T-SBC Communications and Comcast-Time Warner, and three airline deals: United-Continental, Southwest-Airtran, and American-US Airways.

American industry is more highly concentrated than at any time since the gilded age. Need a pharmacy? Americans have two main choices. A plane ticket? Four major airlines. They have four choices to buy cell phone service. Soon one company will sell more than a quarter of the quaffs of beer around the world.

Mergers peaked last year at $2 trillion in the U.S. The top 50 companies in a majority of American industries gained share between 1997 and 2012, and “competition may be decreasing in many economic sectors,” President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers warned in April.

While the impact of this wave of mergers is much debated, prominent economists such as Lawrence Summers and Joseph Stiglitz suggest that it is one important reason why, even as corporate profits hit records, economic growth is slow, wages are stagnant, business formation is halting, and productivity is lagging. “Only the monopoly-power story can convincingly account” for high business profits and low corporate investment, Summers wrote earlier this year.

In addition, politicians such as U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren have criticized big mergers for giving a handful of companies too much clout. President-elect Trump said in October that his administration would not approve the AT&T-Time Warner merger “because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”

During the campaign, Trump didn’t signal what his broader approach to mergers would be. But the early signs are that his administration will weaken antitrust enforcement and strengthen the hand of economists. HeselectedJoshua Wright, an economist and professor at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School, to lead his transition on antitrust matters. Wright, himself a former consultant for Boston-based Charles River Associates, regularly celebrates mergers in speeches and articles and has supported increasing the influence of economists in assessing monopoly power. “Mergers between competitors do not often lead to market power but do often generate significant benefits for consumers,”he wrotein The New York Times this week.

A late Obama administration push to scrutinize major deals notwithstanding, the government over the past several decades has pulled back on merger enforcement. In part, this shift reflects the influence of Carlton and other economists. Today, lawyers still write the briefs, make the arguments and conduct the trials, but the core arguments are over economists’ models of what will happen if the merger goes ahead.

These complex mathematical formulations carry weight with the government because they purport to be objective. But a ProPublica examination of several marquee deals found that economists sometimes salt away inconvenient data in footnotes and suppress negative findings, stretching the standards of intellectual honesty to promote their clients’ interests.

Earlier this year, a top Justice Department official criticized Compass Lexecon for using “junk science.” ProPublica sent a detailed series of questions to Compass Lexecon for this story. The firm declined to comment on the record.

Even some academic specialists worry that the research companies buy is slanted. “This is not the scientific method,” said Orley Ashenfelter, a Princeton economist known for analyzing the effects of mergers. Referring to one Compass study of an appliance industry deal, he said, “The answer is known in advance, either because you created what the client wanted or the client selected you as the most favorable from whatever group was considered.”

In contrast to their scholarship, the economists’ paid work for corporations rests almost entirely out of the public eye. Even other academics cannot see what they produce on behalf of clients. Their algorithms are shared only with government economists, many of whom have backgrounds in academia and private consulting, and hope to return there. At least seven professors on Compass’s payroll, including Carlton, have served as the top antitrust economist at the Department of Justice. Charles River Associates boasts at least three.

“There are few government functions outside the CIA that are so secretive as the merger review process,” said Seth Bloom, the formergeneral counsel of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee.

Corporations pay Dennis Carlton, a University of Chicago economist and Compass Lexecon expert, at least $1,350 an hour to forecast the effects of mergers.(Elise Giordano/University of Florida Levin College of Law)

ONE EVENING IN 1977,University of Chicago law professor Richard Posner hosted a colleague from the economics department and a young law student named Andrew Rosenfield at his apartment in Hyde Park. The leading scholar of the “Law and Economics” movement, Posner wanted to apply rigorous math and economics concepts to the real world. “Why not see if there are some consulting opportunities?” he mused. The three of them agreed to form a firm, throwing in $700 for a third each. They called it “Lexecon,” combining the Latin for law with “econ.”

The trio then shopped their services to a dozen law firms, which all turned them down. “If you had to value the firm at the end of the tour, you’d have to say it was zero,” said Rosenfield.

They went back to their academic work. Not too long after, AT&T called Posner to ask if he could consult on its antitrust defense. The government was trying to break up Ma Bell. Posner agreed. So began a long and mutually beneficial relationship between AT&T and Lexecon.

Soon after its founding, Lexecon hired one of Chicago’s most promising young economists: Dennis Carlton. He had grown up in Brighton, Mass., earning degrees from a trifecta of elite local institutions: Boston Latin High School, Harvard, and MIT, where he would later endow a chair. He played basketball in his spare time. “Backaches have temporarily sidelined me from embarking on my second career as a basketball player in the NBA,” he joked in a 40th reunion report to his Harvard classmates in 2012. (After a short interview with ProPublica, Carlton subsequently declined comment, citing client confidentiality.)

Ronald Reagan appointed Posner to the federal bench in 1981. Posner left Lexecon. “Andy and I were young,” Carlton said. “Gee, we wondered: Is the firm going to survive? Not only did it survive, but it did very well.”

Lexecon capitalized on the Eighties merger explosion. M&A was rising to cultural prominence as the domain of swashbucklers. Corporate raiders enlisted renegade lawyers and brash investment bankers to take on stalwart names of American industry.

Behind the scenes, the less-flamboyant economists gained influence. From the time antitrust laws began to be passed, in the late 19th century, until the 1970s, courts and the government had presumed a merger was bad for customers if it resulted in high concentration, measured at thresholds much lower than the market shares for the dominant companies in many sectors today.

Led by University of Chicago theorists, a new group of scholars argued that this approach was overly simplistic. Even if a company dominated its industry, it might lower prices or create offsetting efficiencies, allowing customers more choice or higher quality products. In 1982, William Baxter, Reagan’s first head of the Justice Department antitrust division, codified the requirement that the government use economic models and principles to forecast the effect of mergers.

Lexecon seized the opportunity. “We were not just going to talk about economic theory but show with data that what we were saying could be justified,” Carlton said. By the late 1980s, the top four Lexecon officers were each making $1.5 million a year, according to a Wall Street Journal article.

ANY MERGER OVERa certain dollar size — currently, $78 million — requires government approval. The government passes most mergers without question. On rare occasions, it requests more data from the merging parties. Then the companies often hire consulting firms to produce economic analyses supporting the deal. (Sometimes the government hires its own outside academic.) Even less frequently, the government concludes it can’t approve the merger as proposed. In such cases, the government typically settles with the two companies, requiring some concession, such as sale of a division or product line. Just a handful of times a year, the government will sue to block a merger. Recently, the Obama administration has filed several major suits to block mergers, as companies in already concentrated industries propose bigger and bigger deals. According to a tally from the law firm Dechert, the government challenged a record seven mergers last year out of a total of 10,250.

Recent research supports the classic view that large mergers, by reducing competition, hurt consumers. The 2008 merger between Miller and Coors spurred “an abrupt increase” in beer prices, an academic analysis found this year. In the most comprehensive review of the academic literature, Northeastern economist John Kwoka studied the effects of thousands of mergers. Prices on average increased by more than 4 percent. Prices rose on more than 60 percent of the products and those increases averaged almost 9 percent. “Enforcers clear too many harmful mergers,” American University’s Jonathan Baker, a Compass economist who has consulted for both corporations and the government, wrote in 2015.

Once a merger is approved, nobody studies whether the consultants’ predictions were on the mark. The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission do not make available the reports that justify mergers, and those documents cannot be obtained through public records requests. Sometimes the companies file the expert reports with the courts, but judges usually agree to companies’ requests to seal the documents. After a merger is cleared, the government no longer has access to the companies’ proprietary data on their pricing.

The expert reports “are not public so only the government can check,” said Ashenfelter, the Princeton economist who has consulted for both government and private industry. “And the government no longer has the data so they can’t check.” How accurate are the experts? “The answer is no one knows and no one wants to find out.”

COMPASS LEXECON ITSELFis the product of serial M&A. A Michael Milken-backed company bought Lexecon for $60 million in 1999. Then it sold Lexecon to FTI Consulting, an umbrella group of professional consulting service firms, in 2003 for $130 million. In the deal, Carlton received $15 million through 2008 in non-compete payments, according to a Chicago Crain’s Business story. He also has held an equity stake in the firm. In 2006, FTI bought Competition Policy Associates, another consulting firm that had also built itself through combination, merging it with Lexecon to form Compass Lexecon. FTI Consulting had $1.8 billion in revenue in 2015, of which $447 million came from economic consulting. The economic consulting division has 600 “revenue-producing” professionals who bill at an average hourly rate of $512 an hour, the highest of all the company’s segments. Charles River Associates brought in about $300 million in revenue last year, led by antitrust consulting.

So few top consulting firms and leading experts dominate the sector today that economists wonder mordantly whether excess concentration plagues their own industry. In 2013, the government granted a waiver to Joshua Wright, the law professor and economist who was a consultant for Charles River. The waiver permitted him to serve as an FTC commissioner and review deals his former consulting firm advised on, as long as he didn’t deliberate on matters that he had directly worked on. Otherwise, the commission’s business might have ground to a halt because Charles River was involved in a third of all merger cases that came before the agency. Wright declined to comment.

Jonathan Orszag, senior managing director of Compass Lexecon, came up with a solution to allow Compass experts to work on more mergers. He is a well-known figure in Washington circles, and the brother of Peter Orszag, the vice chairman of investment bank Lazard and former high level Obama administration official. Jonathan’s social media teems with his globetrotting adventures. Brides magazinefeatured his destination wedding in the Bahamas. In August 2015, hecelebrated on Twitterthat he had played on all of the top 100 golf courses in the world. Although he does not have a Ph.D. in economics, he serves as an expert himself and is respected particularly for his expertise on global deals. He declined to comment on the record to ProPublica.

At Orszag’s urging, the firm relaxed its conflict of interest rules, according to multiple people who have worked with or for Compass. Now, Compass Lexecon experts can, and do, advise both sides in disputes. (Under Compass policy, the parties need to consent to such arrangements.) Separate teams of staffers, who cannot communicate with the opposing side, run the cases. The arrangements require on occasion that experts with adjacent offices must stop talking to each other during cases.

Compass economists can reach very different answers to the same question, depending on who is paying them. In 2012, the federal government and a group of statessuedApple for conspiring with several major publishers to fix prices on e-books.

The states hired American University’s Jonathan Baker, the Compass economist, as one of its experts. Baker’s report concluded that e-book prices cost19 percent morethan they should, as a result of the price-fixing. Another government expert arrived at the same 19 percent estimate, and calculated that consumers had been overcharged by $300 million.

Apple later hired Orszag, also of Compass, to do the same calculation. Orszag first came to the conclusion that the effect on prices was lower than the government side’s estimate, around 15 percent. Then he argued there were offsetting benefits to consumers that knocked the number all the way down to1.9 percent, or just $28 million.

“The actual harms suffered by consumers … aremodest,” Orszag concluded.

A federal judge slapped Orszag down for that work. Denise Cote, of the Southern District of New York, threw out part of Orszag’s report in the Apple case. The judge assailed Orszag’s studyas “unmoored” from factsand “unsupported by any rigorous analysis,” criticizing a calculation of his as “jerry-rigged.”