Working Paper: NBER ID: w25968
Authors: Changtai Hsieh; Esteban Rossi-Hansberg
Abstract: The rise in national industry concentration in the US between 1977 and 2013 is driven by a new industrial revolution in three broad non-traded sectors: services, retail, and wholesale. Sectors where national concentration is rising have increased their share of employment, and the expansion is entirely driven by the number of local markets served by firms. Firm employment per market has either increased slightly at the MSA level, or decreased substantially at the county or establishment levels. In industries with increasing concentration, the expansion into more markets is more pronounced for the top 10% firms, but is present for the bottom 90% as well. These trends have not been accompanied by economy-wide concentration. Top U.S. firms are increasingly specialized in sectors with rising industry concentration, but their aggregate employment share has remained roughly stable. We argue that these facts are consistent with the availability of a new set of fixed-cost technologies that enable adopters to produce at lower marginal costs in all markets. We present a simple model of firm size and market entry to describe the menu of new technologies and trace its implications.
Keywords: industrial revolution; services; market concentration; employment dynamics; technology adoption
JEL Codes: E23; E24; L11; L22; L25; R11; R12
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| adoption of new fixed-cost technologies (O14) | increased market entry by firms (L19) |
| increase in industry concentration (L69) | overall employment dynamics (J60) |
| adoption of new fixed-cost technologies (O14) | lower marginal costs (D40) |
| lower marginal costs (D40) | entry into new markets (L17) |
| rise in national industry concentration (L19) | expansion into more local markets (R33) |