I develop a model of dynamic firm entry, oligopolistic competition and returns to scale in order to decompose TFP fluctuations into technical change, economic profit and markup fluctuations. I show that economic profits cause short-run upward bias in measured TFP, but this subsides to upward...

We characterize the dispersion of firm-level productivity and demand shocks over the business cycle using Swedish microdata including prices and analyse the consequences for firms and the aggregate economy. Demand dispersion increases by more than productivity dispersion in recessions....

This study is to our knowledge the first attempt to infer the consequences on productivity entailed by anticompetitive regulations in product and labor markets through their impacts on production prices and wages. Results are encouraging showing that changes in production prices and wages at...

This paper investigates the effect of merger-driven market concentration on the markups of non-merging rival firms in Europe’s paper manufacturing industry. Using a representative data set of 400 independently-owned companies spanning a ten-year period, we aim to disentangle the impact of...

Although coordination of wage bargaining probably affects entry barriers and competition in product markets, research on price determination has typically not considered such factors. We argue that the price markup depends on wage setting institutions and present empirical evidence in form of...

Although coordination of wage bargaining probably affects entry barriers and competition in product markets, research on price determination has typically not considered such factors. In this paper the price markup depends on coordination and is estimated on a panel of 15 OECD countries. The...

This paper tests the pro-competitive effect of trade in the product and labour markets of UK manufacturing sectors between 1988 and 2003 using a two-stage estimation procedure. In the first stage, we use data on 9820 firms from twenty manufacturing sectors to simultaneously estimate mark-up and...

Although coordination of wage bargaining probably affects entry barriers and competition in product markets, research on price determination has typically not considered such factors. In this paper the price markup depends on coordination and is estimated on a panel of 15 OECD countries. The...

The cyclical behavior of markups is at the center of macroeconomic debate on the origins of business-cycle fluctuations and policy effectiveness. In theory, markups may fluctuate endogenously with the business cycle due to sluggish price adjustment or to deeper motives affecting the...

We assess how demand and supply shocks (identified via the Blanchard and Quah (1989) SVAR approach) in 14 OECD countries affect mark-ups. We find that individual responses of markups to demand shocks push down the markup for most countries (confirmed in the panel analysis). On the other hand, a...