U.S. Market Concentration and Import Competition

Mary Amiti and Sebastian Heise

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: Many studies have documented that market concentration has risen among U.S. firms in recent decades. In this paper, we show that this rise in concentration was accompanied by tougher product market competition due to the entry of foreign competitors. Using confidential census data covering the universe of all firm sales in the U.S. manufacturing sector, we find that rising import competition increased concentration among U.S. firms by reallocating sales from smaller to larger U.S. firms and by causing firm exit. However, this increase in concentration was counteracted by the expansion of foreign firms, which reduced domestic firms� share of the U.S. market inclusive of foreign firms� sales. We find that once the sales of foreign exporters are taken into account, U.S. marketconcentration in manufacturing was stable between 1992 and 2012.

Keywords: market concentration; markups; import competition; international trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 F60 L11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2022-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-com, nep-ind and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2022/CES-WP-22-34.pdf First version, 2022 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: U.S. Market Concentration and Import Competition (2021)
Working Paper: U.S. Market Concentration and Import Competition (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:cen:wpaper:22-34

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dawn Anderson ().