 Market Power and Labor ShareArthur Bauer and Jocelyn Boussard Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, 2020, issue 520-521, 125-146 Abstract: [eng] Secular trends in market power and labor share have important implications for inequality and allocative efficiency. Studying them requires comprehensive, detailed firm-level data spanning several decades. Using a novel database on the universe of French firms between 1984 and 2016, we document a rise in concentration since the early 1990s. Despite a stability of the aggregate labor share, larger firms with lower labor shares gained market shares, especially in industries where concentration increased the most. The markup of the typical firm, considered here as a proxy of its market power, has decreased, but market shares reallocation toward larger firms contributed to an increase in the aggregate markup. In particular, we do not find that the rise in concentration is accompanied by an increase in market power at the top. Finally, we show that taking into account reallocation across firms is essential to understand how the trends in market power have shaped the dynamics of the aggregate labor share in France. JEL-codes: E10 E23 E25 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nse:ecosta:ecostat_2020_520d_8 DOI: 10.24187/ecostat.2020.520d.2034 Access Statistics for this article Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Dominique Goux More articles in Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics from Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques (INSEE) Contact information at EDIRC. |
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