This report presents new evidence on industry concentration trends in Europe and in North America. It uses two novel data sources: representative firm-level concentration measures from the OECD MultiProd project, and business-group-level concentration measures using matched Orbis-Worldscope-Zephyr data. Based on the MultiProd data, it finds that between 2001 and 2012 the average industry across 10 European economies saw a 2-3-percentage-point increase in the share of the 10% largest companies in industry sales. Using the Orbis-Worldscope-Zephyr data, it documents a clear increase in industry concentration in Europe as well as in North America between 2000 and 2014 of the order of 4-8 percentage points for the average industry. Over the period, about 3 out of 4 (2-digit) industries in each region saw their concentration increase. The increase is observed for both manufacturing and non-financial services and is not driven by digital-intensive sectors.

Calligaris provided excellent assistance with the metadata and Flavio Calvino with the policy data. A previous version of this document was presented and discussed by the OECD Committee for Industry, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) and its Working Party on Industry Analysis (WPIA).

This paper presents new evidence on industry concentration at both the country and the world-region levels. It calculates country-level industry concentration measures from the novel data representative of the entire firm population in 12 European countries, and it develops a methodology for calculating industry concentration at the supranational level using detailed cross-country data on subsidiaries of business groups. This paper documents that industry concentration has increased not only in North America but also in Europe since 2000, albeit to a lesser extent.

The literature has established two robust stylized facts: (i) the existence of a firm size-wage premium and (ii) a positive relationship between firm size and productivity. However, the existing evidence is mainly based on manufacturing, which nowadays accounts for a small share of the economy. Using a unique micro-aggregated dataset covering 17 countries over 1994-2012, this paper compares these relationships across sectors. While the size-wage and size-productivity premia are significantly weaker in market services compared to manufacturing, the link between wages and productivity is stronger. In a service economy the stylized fact is a “productivity-wage premium” rather than a “size-wage premium.”

This paper estimates the consumer welfare impact of the new generation of trade agreements implemented by the European Union between 1993 and 2013. We decompose the overall eect into contributions of changes in prices, quality and variety. Estimating trade elasticities for narrow product categories of EU imports, we infer quality from data on imported values and volumes. For the EU as a whole, we nd that trade agreements increased quality by 7% on average but did not aect prices or variety. This translates into a cumulative reduction in the consumer price index of 0.24% over our sample period. We also nd a high degree of impact heterogeneity across EU countries, trading partners and the type of trade agreement, with high-income EU countries seeing much stronger quality increases and larger overall consumer benets.

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Note to Delegations:This document is also available on OLIS under the reference code: DSTI/CIIE(2017)4/FINAL This document, as well as any data and any map included herein, are without prejudice to the status of or sovereignty over any territory, to the delimitation of international frontiers and boundaries and to the name of any territory, city or area.The statistical data for Israel are supplied by and under the responsibility of the relevant Israeli authorities.The use of such data by the OECD is without prejudice to the status of the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and Israeli settlements in the West Bank under the terms of international law.

We study how the technological importance of inputs-measured by cost shares-is related to the decision to "make" or "buy" that input. Using detailed French international trade data and an instrumental variable approach based on self-constructed input-output tables, we show that multinationals vertically integrate high cost share inputs. A stylized incomplete contracting model with both ex-ante and ex-post inefficiencies explains why: technologically more important inputs are "made" when transaction cost economics type forces overpower property rights type forces. However, additional results show that both types forces are needed to explain the full patterns in the data.