Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Competition And Monopoly In The U.S. Economy: What Do Industrial Concentration Data Tell?, Leila Davis, ÖZgüR Orhangazi

PERI Working Papers

A recent series of academic studies, think-tank reports, and news articles shows widespread attention to rising industrial concentration and market power in the U.S. economy. In this paper, we focus on concentration in the U.S. nonfinancial corporate sector to make three contributions to this literature. First, we trace the theoretical origins of the debate on industrial concentration, and show that there is a certain degree of ambiguity surrounding the expected consequences of concentration and monopolization for nonfinancial firms. Second, we use industry- level concentration data to describe recent trends in average concentration. We show that, while concentration increases across the …