Are US Industries Becoming More Concentrated?*

Are US Industries Becoming More Concentrated?

More than 75% of US industries have experienced an increase in concentration levels over the last two decades. Firms in industries with the largest increases in product market concentration have enjoyed higher profit margins, positive abnormal stock returns, and more profitable M&A deals, suggesting that market power is becoming an important source of value. Lax enforcement of antitrust regulat...

Are the Young Becoming More Disabled? -- Appendix

Are workers more vulnerable in tradable industries?

Reduced trade barriers and lower costs of transportation and information have meant that a growing part of the economy has been exposed to international trade. In particular, this is the case in the service sector. We divide the service sector into a tradable and a non-tradable part using an approach to identify tradable industries utilizing a measure of regional concentration of production. We...

Oblivious equilibrium for concentrated industries

This paper explores the application of oblivious equilibrium to concentrated industries. We define an extended notion of oblivious equilibrium that we call partially oblivious equilibrium (POE) that allows for there to be a set of “dominant firms”, whose firm states are always monitored by every other firm in the market. We perform computational experiments that show that POE are often close to...

Are U.S. Corn and Soybeans Becoming More Drought Tolerant?

An objective drought index that measures the dry and hot conditions adversely affecting crop yields is used in a regression analysis to test whether corn and soybeans have become more drought tolerant. Results indicate that corn yield losses from a drought of a given severity, whether measured in quantity terms or as a percentage of mean yield, have decreased over time. The null hypothesis that...