Intangibles and industry concentration: Supersize me

Matěj Bajgar, Chiara Criscuolo and Jonathan Timmis ()

No 2021/12, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: This paper presents new evidence on the growing scale of big businesses in the United States, Japan, and Europe. It finds broad evidence of rising industry concentration across the majority of countries and sectors over the period 2002 to 2014. Rising concentration is strongly associated with intensive investment in intangibles, particularly innovative assets, software, and data. This relationship appears to be stronger in more globalised and digital-intensive industries. The results are consistent with intangibles disproportionately benefiting large firms and enabling them to scale up and increase market shares. We find nuanced implications of these new business models for competition – rising markups and reduced churning amongst the top firms, but falling industry prices.

Keywords: Competition; Industry and entrepreneurship; Innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E22 L1 L25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-09-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-com, nep-ent, nep-ind, nep-isf, nep-mac, nep-sbm, nep-tid and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1787/ce813aa5-en (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Intangibles and industry concentration: supersize me (2021)
Working Paper: Intangibles and industry concentration: supersize me (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oec:stiaaa:2021/12-en

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers from OECD Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().