In this paper, we assess the cyclicality of mark-ups and profit margins within the United Kingdom, at both the aggregate and industry level. We find that the private sector labour share moves countercyclically, suggesting that the aggregate mark-up moves procyclically. This result survives when...

Persistent shifts in equilibria are likely to arise in oligopolistic markets and may be detrimental to the measurement of conduct, related markups and intensity of competition. We develop a cointegrated VAR (vector autoregression) based approach to detect long-run changes in conduct when data...

Intertemporal shifts in conduct, such as a transition from competitive to anticompetitive behavior, induce shifts in the firms' equilibrium price configurations. Such shifts generate non-stationary price dynamics in addition to those which originate from exogenous fundamentals. We exploit this...

We develop a tractable dynamic general equilibrium model of oligopolistic competition with a continuum of heterogeneous industries. Industries are exposed to aggregate and industry-specific productivity shocks. Firms in each industry set value-maximizing state-contingent markups, taking as given...

In this paper, we present estimates of the mark-up of product price over marginal costs for the manufacturing industries of the US and the other G-5 countries. The paper extends the analysis used in previous studies based on nominal productivity residuals by considering intermediate inputs and...

This paper presents estimates of the cyclical fluctuations of price-cost margins, following an extended version of the Rotemberg and Woodford (1991) approach. The results support the hypothesis of counter-cyclical price margins in most manufacturing industries, especially in the presence of...

This paper presents estimates of the cyclical fluctuations of price-cost margins, following an extended version of the Rotemberg and Woodford (1991) approach. The results support the hypothesis of counter-cyclical price margins in most manufacturing industries, especially in the presence of...

The aim of this study is to analyse the impact of competition, both internal and external, and of the business cycle on monopolistic markups in the Polish economy. The results show that there are significant markups in several sectors of the economy which complies with earlier estimations by the...

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

This paper analyses the impact of financial frictions on markup adjustments at the firm level. We use a rich panel data set that matches information on banking relationships with firm-level data. By relying on insights from recent contributions in the literature, we obtain exogenous credit...