Events

Professor Yueran Ma
Professor of Finance
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

We collect long-run data on the firm size distribution in ten market-based economies in Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania, where we can obtain comprehensive coverage of the population of companies. Around the world, we observe prevalent increases in the concentration of sales and net income over the past century, in the aggregate and at the industry level. Meanwhile, employment concentration has been relatively stable over the long run. The evidence shows that rising dominance of large firms is a pervasive phenomenon, not limited to the recent decades or the United States, and they achieve a greater scale with relatively few workers.