100 years of rising corporate concentration

Spencer Y. Kwon, Yueran Ma and Kaspar Zimmermann

No 359, SAFE Working Paper Series from Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE

Abstract: We collect data on the size distribution of all U.S. corporate businesses for 100 years. We document that corporate concentration (e.g., asset share or sales share of the top 1%) has increased persistently over the past century. Rising concentration was stronger in manufacturing and mining before the 1970s, and stronger in services, retail, and wholesale after the 1970s. Furthermore, rising concentration in an industry aligns closely with investment intensity in research and development and information technology. Industries with higher increases in concentration also exhibit higher output growth. The long-run trends of rising corporate concentration indicate increasingly stronger economies of scale.

Keywords: Corporate concentration; economies of scale (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E01 E23 N12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-his, nep-ict and nep-ind
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/265052/1/1817557262.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:safewp:359

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3936799

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SAFE Working Paper Series from Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).