Business Concentration around the World: 1900-2020

Yueran Ma (), Mengdi Zhang () and Kaspar Zimmermann ()
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Yueran Ma: University of Chicago – Booth School of Business
Mengdi Zhang: Northwestern University
Kaspar Zimmermann: Kiel Institute for the World Economy and University of Hamburg

No 2026-13, Working Papers from Becker Friedman Institute for Research In Economics

Abstract: We collect new data to document the long-run evolution of the firm size distribution in ten marketbased economies in Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania, where we can obtain comprehensive coverage of the population of firms. Around the world, we observe prevalent increases in the concentration of sales, net income, and equity capital over the past century. These trends hold in the aggregate and at the industry level. Meanwhile, employment concentration has been stable over the long run in most cases. The evidence shows that the rising dominance of large firms is a pervasive phenomenon, not limited to the recent decades or the United States, and that large firms often achieve greater scale without proportionally more workers.

JEL-codes: E01 L1 N1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 104 pages
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bfi:wpaper:2026-13

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