【AEW Webinar】Technology and Market Power: The United States Cement Industry, 1974-2019

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• 研討會日期 : 2024-01-11
• 時間 : 08:30
• 主講人 : Professor Nathan Miller
• 地點 : Register and join online
• 演講者簡介 : Professor Nathan Miller received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 2008. He is currently a Professor at Georgetown University. His research interests are industrial organization and antitrust economics.
• 演講摘要 : We examine the evolution of market power in the cement industry over more than four decades using a structural model of procurement. The model matches aggregated outcomes in the data, and implies transportation costs, shipping distances, and demand elasticities that are consistent with external sources. Evaluating county-level outcomes throughout the contiguous United States, we find that market concentration and markups increase but that prices do not rise. We attribute these patterns to a technological innovation—the precalciner kiln—that lowered variable costs, increased plant-level capacities and economies of scale, and contributed to an industry shakeout in which many plants closed.
• Working Paper Title : New Technology Diffusion: Implications for Monopsony Power, Markups, and Labor Share
• Working Paper Speaker Biography : Professor Naoki Wakamori received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. He is currently an Associate Professor at Hitotsubashi University. His primary research interest is Industrial Organization.
• Working Paper Abstract : This paper investigates the potential implications of ignoring heterogeneity in production technology at each plant on monopsony power and markups. We collect plant-level data where we directly observe the types of production technology during new technology diffusion. We demonstrate that estimating a common production function for all plants results in upward trends in both monopsony power, measured by the differences in growth rates of MRPL and wages, and markups, obtained by production approach. However, accounting for production technology in the analysis eliminates these upward trends, highlighting the importance of controlling for heterogeneity in production technology even within a narrowly-defined industry.