Business Concentration around the World: 1900鈥�2020

, Carhart Family Professor of Finance

The authors collect long-run data on the firm size distribution in ten market-based conomies in Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania, where we can obtain comprehensive coverage of the population of companies. Around the world, they 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 stable over the long run in most cases. 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 often achieve a greater scale with relatively few workers.