Yueran Ma, Assistant Professor of Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
We collect data on the size distribution of all US corporate businesses for 100 years. We document that corporate concentration (eg, asset share or sales share of the top 1%) has increased persistently over the past century. Rising concentration was stronger in manufacturing and mining before the 1970s, and stronger in services, retail, and wholesale after the 1970s. Furthermore, rising concentration in an industry aligns closely with investment intensity in research and development and information technology. Industries with higher increases in concentration also exhibit higher output growth. The long run trends of rising corporate concentration indicate increasingly stronger economies of scale.
Speaker bio
Yueran Ma is an assistant professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Her main research interest is empirical studies at the intersection of finance and macroeconomics. Her work covers topics including debt contracts and macroeconomic implications, assets and production activities of non-financial firms, low interest rates and financial markets, and expectations in finance and macroeconomics. She has also worked on questions in real estate and urban economics. She received BA summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in Applied Mathematics, and PhD in Business Economics, from Harvard University.
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