Seminar – Mark-ups and Concentration in the Digital Era

Chiara Criscuolo, OECD

The talk will discuss ongoing changes in the competitive environment in OECD countries, based on two of Chiara Criscuolo’s papers. The first paper entitled Mark-ups in the digital era examines the evolution of firm mark-ups across 26 countries for the period 2001-14. It also discusses and investigates empirically how this can be related to the degree of digital transformation in different industries. Four main facts emerge:

1. Mark-ups are increasing over the period, on average across countries.
2. This result is driven by firms at the top of the mark-up distribution, while the bottom half of the distribution exhibits a flat trend over time.
3. Mark-ups are higher in digital-intensive sectors than in less-digitally intensive sectors.
4. Mark-up differentials between digitally-intensive and less-digitally-intensive sectors have increased significantly over time.

The second paper, Industry Concentration in Europe and North America, presents new evidence on industry concentration trends in Europe and in North America. It uses two novel data sources: representative firm-level concentration measures from the OECD MultiProd project, and business-group-level concentration measures using matched Orbis-Worldscope-Zephyr data. Based on the MultiProd data, it finds that between 2001 and 2012 the average industry across 10 European economies saw a two to three percentage-point increase in the share of the 10 per cent largest companies in industry sales. Using the Orbis-Worldscope-Zephyr data, it documents a clear increase in industry concentration in Europe as well as in North America between 2000 and 2014 of the order of four to eight percentage points for the average industry. Over the period, about three out of four (two-digit) industries in each region saw their concentration increase. The increase is observed for both manufacturing and non-financial services and is not driven by digital-intensive sectors.

Speaker bio

Chiara Criscuolo is head of the Productivity and Business Dynamics Division in the Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation at the OECD, and research associate at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics.

Her work focuses on productivity, innovation, competition and policy evaluation, and the use of firm-level data for cross-country policy analysis. She co-manages the Global Forum on Productivity and is a member of the French and Portuguese National Productivity Boards.