Industry Concentration in Europe and North America

By Matěj Bajgar, Giuseppe Berlingieri, Sara Calligaris, Chiara Criscuolo, Jon Timmis. OECD Productivity Working Papers, 2019

119 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This report presents new evidence on industry concentration trends in Europe and in North America. It uses two novel data sources: representative firm-level concentration measures from the OECD MultiProd project, and business-group-level concentration measures using matched Orbis-Worldscope-Zephyr data. Based on the MultiProd data, it finds that between 2001 and 2012 the average industry across 10 European economies saw a 2-3-percentage-point increase in the share of the 10% largest companies in industry sales. Using the Orbis-Worldscope-Zephyr data, it documents a clear increase in industry concentration in Europe as well as in North America between 2000 and 2014 of the order of 4-8 percentage points for the average industry. Over the period, about 3 out of 4 (2-digit) industries in each region saw their concentration increase. The increase is observed for both manufacturing and non-financial services and is not driven by digital-intensive sectors.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2d47c038b6bcd948f7754fc6099d0af9568c66be

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Citations in the corpus

The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms* (2017, background): “Bajgar et al. (2018a) find that between 2001 and 2012, industrylevel concentration levels rose in the European countries where comprehensive data are available. They estimate that the share of the top decile of companies (measured by sales) increased on average by 2 percentage points in manufacturin”
From Good to Bad Concentration? US Industries over the Past 30 Years (2019, methodology): “Bajgar et al. (2019) use ORBIS data to include private firms; and take into account that some firms are part of larger business groups. When they measure concentration at the business group-level within 2-digit industries they find a moderate increase in concentration in Europe, with the unweighted ”
What Happened to US Business Dynamism? (2019, unknown): “2Bajgar et al. (2019) and Kalemli-Ozcan et al. (2019) document similar patterns for European countries as well, focusing on consolidated firm accounts. 3Calligaris et al. (2018) and De Loecker and Eeckhout (2018) document similar patterns for various other countries as well.”