We analyze private fixed investment in the U.S. over the past 30 years. We show that investment is weak relative to measures of profitability and valuation - particularly Tobin's Q, and that this weakness starts in the early 2000's. There are two broad categories of explanations: theories that...

We present estimates of 4 and 8 firm concentration ratios by industry and in weighted aggregate form for the manufacturing sector for Chinese enterprises for 2002 and 2007. These are then compared to available estimates for the same years and industrial classification for the US. These...

This paper studies the effects of trade liberalization on the evolution of firm productivity. The productivity of each firm was estimated using an unbalanced panel data of 4,484 Brazilian manufacturing firms from 1986 to 1998, following the procedure first proposed by Olley and Pakes (1996) and...

This paper uses new data to reexamine trends in concentration in U.S. markets from 1994 to 2019. The paper's main contribution is to construct concentration measures that reflect narrowly defined consumption-based product markets, as would be defined in an antitrust setting, while accounting for...

Do low interest rates contribute to the rise in market concentration? Using data on firm financials and high frequency monetary policy shocks, we find that falling interest rates disproportionately benefit industry leaders, especially when the initial interest rate is already low. Falling rates...

This survey examines recent developments in economic research relating to antitrust, paying specific attention to research in the areas of collusion and merger enforcement. Research relating to both collusion and mergers has made significant advances in the last twenty years. With respect to...

In essence, this paper will try to decompose the concentration-profits relationship into separate concentration-price arid concentration-cost relationships. By doing this, I hope to shed light on some of the allocative and distributive issues that, I suspect, give the subject its intrinsic...

Concentration of insured deposit funding among the top four commercial banks in the U.S. has risen from 15% in 1984 to 44% in 2018, a roughly three-fold increase. Regulation has often been attributed as a factor in that increase. The Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of...

This study provides a new theoretical result that low interest rates encourage market concentration by raising industry leaders' incentive to gain a strategic advantage over followers, and this effect strengthens as the interest rate approaches zero. The model provides a unified explanation for...

We document that the rise of factors such as software, intellectual property, brand, and innovative business processes, collectively known as "intangible capital" can explain much of the weakness in physical capital investment since 2000. Moreover, intangibles have distinct economic features...