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Insights / Research BriefMay 10, 2023

Managers and Productivity in Retail

Robert D. Metcalfe, Alexandre B. Sollaci, Chad Syverson
Individual managers impact retail business productivity substantially; replacing a manager at the bottom of the quality distribution by one at the top could increase a store’s productivity by between 50% and 100%.
Topics:  Industrial Organization
Insights / Research BriefMay 03, 2023

Local And National Concentration Trends in Jobs and Sales: The Role of Structural Transformation

David Autor, Christina Patterson, John Van Reenen
Driven by the sizable shift in sales and employment from the relatively concentrated manufacturing sector to the relatively unconcentrated service sector, local concentration in sales has increased in parallel to national sales concentration, while local concentration in employment has declined, despite rising at the national level.
Topics:  Employment & Wages, Industrial Organization
Insights / Research BriefApr 05, 2023

100 Years of Rising Corporate Concentration

Spencer Y. Kwon, Yueran Ma, Kaspar Zimmermann
US corporate concentration has increased persistently over the past century, with the manufacturing and mining sectors consolidating at a faster pace prior to the 1970s, and with the services, retail, and wholesale sectors taking the lead since. These long-run trends appear in line with stronger economies of scale.
Topics:  Industrial Organization
Insights / Research BriefJan 19, 2023

The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the US Construction Sector

Austan Goolsbee, Chad Syverson
Measurement error alone cannot explain the decline in US construction productivity over the last 50 years, with evidence pointing to the sector’s deteriorating ability to transform intermediates into finished products, and to the allocative inefficiency of construction inputs.
Topics:  Industrial Organization
Insights / Research BriefJan 05, 2023

Urban Renewal and Inequality: Evidence from Chicago’s Public Housing Demolitions

Milena Almagro, Eric Chyn, Bryan A. Stuart
Demolitions of public housing as part of urban renewal programs had disparate impacts and generated large welfare improvements for White households, alongside welfare losses for low-income minority households.
Topics:  Industrial Organization
Insights / Research BriefDec 16, 2022

Private Sanctions

Oliver D. Hart, David Thesmar, Luigi Zingales
Of US respondents to a national survey, 61% say firms should exit Russia, regardless of the consequences; 37% think that leaving Russia is a purely business decision; while 66% would boycott nonconforming businesses, but desire to boycott diminishes as respondent costs rise.
Topics:  Financial Markets, Industrial Organization
Insights / Research BriefNov 08, 2022

Investment and Subjective Uncertainty

Steven J. Davis, Nicholas Bloom, Lucia Foster, Scott Ohlmacher, Itay Saporta-Eksten
Investment is strongly and robustly negatively associated with higher uncertainty; uncertainty is also negatively related to employment growth and overall shipments (sales) growth; and flexible inputs like rental capital and temporary workers show a positive relationship to uncertainty.
Topics:  Industrial Organization
Insights / Research BriefMay 11, 2022

A New Era of Midnight Mergers: Antitrust Risk and Investor Disclosures

John M. Barrios, Thomas Wollmann
Firms completed over $2.3 trillion of undisclosed mergers between 2002 and 2016, representing 30% of all merger activity.
Topics:  Financial Markets, Industrial Organization