The Increase in Turbulence and Market Power

Abstract In recent decades, market power has been on the rise, although its increase varies between sectors. We argue that this heterogeneity can be partially attributed to sector-specific differences in turbulence dynamics. Turbulence, a measure of firms’ churn over the revenue productivity distribution, reflects firms’ ability to sustain their productivity over time. In a dynamic oligopolistic competition model, an increase in turbulence accelerates the turnover of leaders, and triggers reallocation of market shares towards high-markup firms. The predictions of our model are consistent with empirical evidence from both the United States and Europe.