IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/24800.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

How Costly Are Markups?

Author

Listed:
  • Chris Edmond
  • Virgiliu Midrigan
  • Daniel Yi Xu

Abstract

We study the welfare costs of markups in a dynamic model with heterogeneous firms and endogenously variable markups. We find that the welfare costs of markups are large. We decompose the costs of markups into three channels: (i) an aggregate markup that acts like a uniform output tax, (ii) misallocation of factors of production, and (iii) an inefficiently low rate of entry. We find that the aggregate markup accounts for about two-thirds of the costs, misallocation accounts for about one-third, and the costs due to inefficient entry are negligible. We evaluate simple policies aimed at reducing the costs of markups. Subsidizing entry is not an effective tool in our model: while more competition reduces individual firms' markups it also reallocates market shares towards larger firms and the net effect is that the aggregate markup hardly changes. Size-dependent policies aimed at reducing concentration can reduce the aggregate markup but have the side effect of greatly increasing misallocation and reducing aggregate productivity.

Suggested Citation

  • Chris Edmond & Virgiliu Midrigan & Daniel Yi Xu, 2018. "How Costly Are Markups?," NBER Working Papers 24800, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24800
    Note: EFG IO ME PR
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24800.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D04 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Microeconomic Policy: Formulation; Implementation; Evaluation
    • E02 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General - - - Institutions and the Macroeconomy
    • L1 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance
    • O4 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24800. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.