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Dr. Yueran Ma
Assistant Professor of Finance
University of Chicago Booth School of Business

We collect data on the size distribution of all U.S. corporate businesses for nearly 100 years. We document that corporate concentration (e.g., asset share or sales share of the top 1%) in the U.S. economy has been increasing persistently over the past century. Across different industries, rising concentration was more pronounced in manufacturing and mining before 1970s, and more pronounced in services, retail, and wholesale after 1970s. We find that the timing and the degree of rising concentration in an industry align closely with the investment intensity in research and development and information technology. In addition, industries with higher increases in concentration also exhibit higher output growth. The evidence suggests that the long-run trends of rising corporate concentration reflect increasingly stronger economies of scale.