Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? In this paper, we develop a theory of granularity (Gabaix, 2011) for the banking sector, introducing Bertrand competition and heterogeneous banks charging variable markups. Using this framework, we show conditions under which...

Recent research documents that ownership concentration is higher in countries with weak investor protection. However, drawing on panel data on corporate ownership in 34 countries between 1995 and 2006, we show this pattern does not hold for newly public firms, which tend to have concentrated...

Large pyramidal family controlled business groups are the predominant form of business organization outside America, Britain, Germany, and Japan. Large pyramidal groups comprising dozens, even hundreds, or listed and unlisted firms place the governance of large swathes of many countries' big...

For the first four decades of its existence the U.S. nuclear power industry was run by regulated utilities, with most companies owning only one or two reactors. Beginning in the late 1990s electricity markets in many states were deregulated and almost half of the nation's 103 reactors were sold...

We examine whether and to what extent consolidation in the U.S. health insurance industry is leading to higher employer-sponsored insurance premiums. We make use of a proprietary, panel dataset of employer-sponsored healthplans enrolling over 10 million Americans annually between 1998 and 2006...

We thank Lakshmi Aiyar, Shawn Cole, Stijn Claessens, Oded Galor, Adair Morse, Mark Rosenzweig, Jeremy Stein, as well as participants in seminars at the IMF, the NBER Political Economy, Corporate Finance, and Growth Workshops, M.I.T., Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the WFA...

We study the evolution of profits, investment and market shares in US industries over the past 40 years. During the 1990's, and at low levels of initial concentration, we find evidence of efficient concentration driven by tougher price competition, intangible investment, and increasing...

Economic research on transfer-pricing behavior by multinational corporadons has emphasized theoretical modeling and institutional description. This paper presents the fiit systematic empirical analysis of transfer prices, using data from the petroleum industry. On the basis of oil imported into...