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研討會總覽

【Trade Seminar】The Evolving Geography of Competition

2025/11/25
  • 研討會日期 : 2025-11-25
  • 時間 : 14:30
  • 主講人 : Professor Stephen Yeaple
  • 地點 : Conference Room B110
  • 主持人 : Professor Han Yang
  • 演講者簡介 : Professor Stephen Yeaple received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2000. He is currently a Professor at the Pennsylvania State University. His research interests are International Trade, Industrial Organization, and Applied Microeconomics.
  • 演講摘要 : Over the last several decades there is increasing concern whether the concentration of economic activity in a small number of large firms has meant an increase in firm market power. While on the one hand technical and legal barriers to entry may have increased the ability of incumbent firms to raise mark-ups without fear of entry, on the other hand the growing concentration may have more benign causes such as technological change that favors greater scale of operations. This paper studies global market power by analyzing activities of U.S. multinational firms through the lens of a model in which firms tailor their mark-up to the local degree of competition. Employing data on virtually all US-owned firms operating across 50 countries for the years 1999 to 2014, we first show that the market power of manufacturing firms has risen substantially, and mostly due to higher mark-ups firm-by-firm: market share reallocation playing a minor role. Second, we confirm the model's predictions that while high-productivity firms generally charge high mark-ups, they prefer to enter markets where a high degree of competition keeps mark-ups relatively low. Weaker firms, in contrast, tend to enter markets in which competition is low. This sorting implies that the average mark-up differences across locations taken at face value understate differences in the extent of competition across countries. Third, we show that the importance of firm sorting to countries has increased over time. The analysis highlights the importance of the firmmarket dimension when studying market power.