Josh De Lyon

Together, this suggests weakening competition and an increasing advantage of “superstar” firms.

It was a pleasure working on this project with Sara Calligaris, Chiara Criscuolo, @angrepp.bsky.social, and Olivero Pallanch.

📈 Leading business groups are expanding sales across product and country markets.

🏢 They use brand acquisitions to consolidate market positions and expand into new markets. But when brands are acquired, their sales seem to weaken compared with non-acquired brands.

📈 Product concentration is 50% higher than industry concentration.

🌍 Both industry and product concentration have increased in Europe but not in the US, while business dynamism has declined in both.

Recent evidence shows rising concentration and declining business dynamism, suggesting weakening competition. However, these studies use industry-level data. Product markets are more relevant for welfare.

Key findings:

Concentration and business dynamics in product markets There is robust evidence that industry concentration has risen over recent decades. However, product market concentration is most relevant for competition. This paper measures concentration and busine...

New @oecd-ocde.bsky.social @oecdinnovation.bsky.social paper on product market concentration and business dynamism! 📊

www.oecd.org/en/publicati....

New approaches to measure (increasing) concentration in Europe Concentration (the share of a market’s output produced by its largest firms) is a key proxy for measuring market competition. This column introduces a cross-country dataset to measure concentration at the industry level between 2000 and 2019. It captures both domestic production and international trade flows as well as business group linkages. It finds that the average concentration across countries increased by five percentage points between 2000 and 2019, with notable differences across geographic competition levels. These insights are important for understanding competition dynamics and informing antitrust and economic policies to foster a competitive environment.

A new way to measure (increasing) market concentration helps understanding of competition dynamics.

By Sara Calligaris, Chiara Criscuolo, @JoshDeLyon.bsky.social @AnGrepp.bsky.social and Oliviero Pallanch

cepr.org/voxeu/colum...

5 years ago today Britain left the EU. Between 2020-2023, Brexit drove up food prices by 4% a year on average.

Research from Jan David Bakker, @joshdelyon.bsky.social , @richarddavies.bsky.social and myself.
You can read the paper here: tinyurl.com/27vjakwa