 Energy, Inflation and Market Power: Excess Pass-Through in FranceAxelle Arquié and Malte Thie Working Papers from CEPII research center Abstract: We explore how, in the French manufacturing sector, producer prices vary with market power during a severe episode of energy price hikes (between January 2020 and February 2023). Our work provides some empirical evidence in favor of a role for firms' market power in explaining inflation, and in favor of the "sellers' inflation" hypothesis (Weber and Wasner 2023): in less competitive sectors, firms could use the energy price hike to increase their prices more than warranted by actual changes in costs. Using a rich dataset on French manufacturing firms' balance sheets, we first estimate markups at the firm-level, and aggregate them at the sectoral level. We then study the response of the producer price index (PPI) to a change in spot energy prices, depending on average market power within sectors. We show that, in sectors with higher markups, prices increase relatively more: in the least competitive sector, firms pass through up to 110% of the energy shock, implying an excess pass-through of 10 percentage points. In addition, we find that the association between markup and pass-through is even higher when markup dispersion is low, consistent with the argument that firms engage in price hikes when they expect their competitors to do the same. Keywords: Inflation; Markups (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:cii:cepidt:2023-16 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from CEPII research center Contact information at EDIRC. |
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