Declining Competition and Investment in the U.S.

Abstract

stimulating discussions. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Investment Responses to Trade Liberalization: Evidence from U.S. Industries and Establishments

“…Our results in this section are consistent with those reported in Gutierrez and Philippon (2017), who nd that while investment in property, plant and equipment is relatively lower for publicly traded rms after PNTR versus before, the relative decline is less substantial for leader rms, dened as rms whose market-to-book value of capital is above the median. 15 Empirically, Bloom et al (2007) show that publicly traded UK rms' investment is negatively associated to the standard deviation of their stock returns, a potential manifestation of demand uncertainty.…”

“…These results relate to the large literature studying the impact of competition on innovation and investment (e.g., Aghion et al (2005)). In this respect our research is most closely related to Gutierrez and Philippon (2017)), which uses publicly available data from Compustat to show that increased exposure to PNTR induces relative increases in investment among leader rms, dened as rms with high market to book value. Compared to that paper, our contribution is twofold.…”

Accounting for Factorless Income

“…This evidence is consistent with certain firms increasing their markups but also is consistent with technology-driven substitution toward firms operating more capital intensive production methods in an environment with stable markups. Gutiérrez and Philippon (2017) confirm that concentration has risen in the U.S. but do not find that to be the case in Europe.…”

“…7 Traina (2018) first showed the sensitivity of the markup estimate in De Loecker and Eeckhout (2017) to the split between COGS and SG&A. Further, Gutiérrez and Philippon (2017) estimate small changes in markups using the De Loecker and Eeckhout (2017) methodology but replacing COGS with total expenses. years since 1960.…”

La economía después del neoliberalismo

“…Como eje de nuestra disciplina, las cuestiones sobre la distribución están recuperando su antiguo auge. Los economistas han desempeñado también un papel importante en el estudio de la concentración creciente de la riqueza, 3 los costos del cambio climático (Revesz et al, 2017), la concentración de mercados importantes (Gutiérrez y Philippon, 2017), el estancamiento del ingreso de la clase tra bajadora (Piketty, Saez y Zucman, 2016) y el cambio en los patrones de la movilidad social. 4 Los economistas tienen aún una preferencia marcada hacia las soluciones políticas basadas en el mercado, y sus recomendaciones suelen enfocarse, de forma estrecha, solamente en fallos de mercado específicos.…”