Abstract We document the evolution of market power based on firm-level data for the U.S. economy since 1955. We measure both markups and profitability. In 1980, aggregate markups start to rise from 21% above marginal cost to 61% now. The increase is driven mainly by the upper tail of the markup distribution: the upper percentiles have increased sharply. Quite strikingly, the median is unchanged. In addition to the fattening upper tail of the markup distribution, there is reallocation of market share from low- to high-markup firms. This rise occurs mostly within industry. We also find an increase in the average profit rate from 1% to 8%. Although there is also an increase in overhead costs, the markup increase is in excess of overhead. We discuss the macroeconomic implications of an increase in average market power, which can account for a number of secular trends in the past four decades, most notably the declining labor and capital shares as well as the decrease in labor market dynamism.
The paper uses a generalized Nash bargain to analyze input levels, profits, and wages in the absence of binding contracts, and compares these with the convenitional binding cont...
Abstract The fall of labor’s share of GDP in the United States and many other countries in recent decades is well documented but its causes remain uncertain. Existing empirical ...
We revisit the transmission mechanism from monetary policy to household consumption in a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model. The model yields empirically realistic d...
Abstract We propose a method to decompose the changes in the wage distribution over a period of time in several factors contributing to those changes. The method is based on the...
In Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, Frank Knight explored the riddle of profitability in a competitive market profit should not be possible under competitive conditions, as the ent...
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