Concentration

Bank Concentration Undermined the Fed’s Monetary Policy During the Last Tightening Cycle

In new analysis, Madhav Parikh examines how competition among banks in the United States shapes the way monetary policy reaches depositors. Tracking U.S. banks from late 2021 through mid-2026, he finds that banks in more concentrated local markets repriced their deposit interest rates less than banks in competitive markets, both as the Fed raised rates and as it cut them.

What Makes a Venture Capitalist Successful?

In new research, Blake Jackson and Ilya Strebulaev track the careers of 100,000 people working at venture capital firms in the United States to ask which investors succeed and why. They find that five percent of VCs generate 90 percent of the industry's profits, that the backgrounds investors bring with them predict who ends up in that group, and that public recognition itself opens the doors to the deals that keep them at the top.

Market Power Has Grown and Antitrust Needs Strengthening, Despite What Shapiro & Yurukoglu and Miller Suggest

Jonathan B. Baker and Fiona Scott Morton challenge the interpretations of two new papers from Carl Shapiro & Ali Yurukoglu and Nathan Miller, which question economy-wide trends toward a rise in market power and, if any such trend has occurred, that it is due to lax antitrust enforcement.

Do Corporate Mergers and Acquisitions Hurt Workers?

Competition authorities and analysts are increasingly focused on the impact of mergers and acquisitions on worker welfare. Using a novel dataset on Canadian firms and workers, David Arnold, Kevin Milligan, Terry S. Moon and Amirhossein Tavakoli test the empirical validity of several theories on how M&A may help or harm workers.

The Big Fail: An Interview with Bethany McLean

The Big Fail co-author Bethany McLean — also co-host of Stigler Center podcast Capitalisn’t — sits down with ProMarket to discuss how concentration and played a role in the United States government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

New Data Shows the Rise of Corporate Concentration in the US in the Past 100 Years

New research observing 100 years of concentration in economic activities and investment in research and development shows that the dominance of large businesses has...

Antitrust Should Be Used as a Targeted Response to Employer Concentration, But It Can’t Do Everything

A large and growing body of research demonstrates that employer concentration affects the wages of many American workers. Antitrust is an important tool in...

More Than 20 Years of Consolidation Have Led to a Dysfunctional Health Care Market

The US health care system is based on markets, which do not function as well as they could, or should. Prices are high and...

The Profit Paradox: “What’s Good for Firms Is Not Necessarily Good for the Workers”

In an interview with ProMarket, Jan Eeckhout discusses his new book The Profit Paradox and explains how market power brings down wages, even if...

Concentration in the EU: Where It is Increasing and Why

Increasing concentration is not unique to the US—recent studies show that concentration is rising in Europe as well, although to a lesser extent than...

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