Is There an Investment Gap in Advanced Economies? If So, Why?

Labor's Share, the Firm's Market Power, and Total Factor Productivity

“…We conjecture that the firm's markups would likely be rising, at least since the 1980s as “industrial concentration in the US began to increase in the early 1980s in most sectors” (Pryor , 317) possibly due to a relaxation of antitrust activity and the associated boom in mergers (see Council of Economic Advisers ; Krugman ; Pryor ; Stiglitz , ). Recent papers by Autor et al (, ), Barkai (), Bessen (), Döttling, Gutiérrez, and Philippon (), and Grullon, Larkin, and Michaely (), amongst others, report rising concentration ratios and rising market power for the United States. Autor et al () find that there is a clear upward trend in industry concentration over the period 1982–2012 “across the vast bulk of the US private sector” (p.3).…”

How European Markets Became Free: A Study of Institutional Drift

“…All financials are converted to USD using the OECD's exchange rates. See Dottling et al (2017) for additional discussion of the dataset.…”

“…Data is sourced across all countries as reported, and aggregated to the segments of Dottling et al (2017) in order to use the corresponding ORBIS concentration series. To be specific, KLEMS data is available at the sector level (19 groups) following the ISIC Rev.…”

“…from OECD, including all countries for which NFC data was available (AUT, BEL, CZE, DEU, ITA, ESP, EST, FIN, FRA, HUN, LTU, LUX, LVA, NLD, SWE, USA). SeeDottling et al (2017) for details on dataset construction.…”

“…Again, we find no persistent investment gap in the EU, compared to a persistent investment gap in the US. SeeGutiérrez and Philippon (2017b) for a more detailed discussion of the evolution of investment in the US, andDottling et al (2017) for a comparison of the EU and the US.…”