1 Competition by any other name

1 Statista, ‘The 100 largest companies in the world by market value in 2019 (in billion U.S. dollars)’: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263264/top-companies-in-the-world-by-market-value/ (accessed January 2020).

2 Matthew Garrahan, ‘Google and Facebook dominance forecast to rise’, Financial Times, 4 December 2017.

3 Jeff Desjardins, ‘The Tech Takeover of Advertising in One Chart’, Visual Capitalist, 22 September 2017.

4 Hannah Kuchler, ‘How Facebook grew too big to handle’, Financial Times, 28 March 2019.

5 Trucost plc, Natural Capital at Risk – The Top 100 Externalities of Business, report undertaken on behalf of the TEEB for Business Coalition and released at a Business for the Environment summit in New Delhi, April 2013.

6 Trefis Team, ‘AmEx Is Likely To Become The Second Largest U.S. Card Processing Company This Year’, Forbes, 29 May 2018; Financial Conduct Authority, ‘Market overview’ in Credit card market study: MS14/6, interim report published 3 November 2015.

7 OECD, Concentration in Seed Markets: Potential Effects and Policy Responses, study published 4 December 2018, p. 19.

8 OECD, Concentration in Seed Markets, p. 10.

9 Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition, John Wiley & Sons, 2018, p. 123.

10 Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism, p. xvii.

11 Resolution Foundation, Is everybody concentrating? Recent trends in product and labour market concentration in the UK, report published 26 July 2018.

12 Scott Corfe and Nicole Gicheva, Concentration not competition: the state of UK consumer markets, Social Market Foundation, October 2017.

13 Gustavo Grullon, Yelena Larkin and Roni Michaely, ‘Are U.S. Industries Becoming More Concentrated?’, Review of Finance, 25 October 2018.

14 Tommaso Valletti, 2019 (unpublished paper). For more on rising concentration across North America and Europe, see OECD Productivity Working Paper No. 18, ‘Industry Concentration in Europe and North America’, published January 2019.

15 Bruce A. Blonigen and Justin R. Pierce, ‘Evidence for the Effects of Mergers on Market Power and Efficiency’, NBER Working Paper No. 22750, October 2016.

16 John E. Kwoka, Mergers, Merger Control, and Remedies: A Retrospective Analysis of U.S. Policy, MIT Press, 2014.

17 See Simcha Barkai’s 2016 paper for the University of Chicago, ‘Declining Labor and Capital Shares’; Jason Furman and Peter Orszag, ‘A Firm-Level Perspective on the Role of Rents in the Rise in Inequality’, presented at ‘A Just Society’ Centennial Event in Honor of Joseph Stiglitz, Columbia University, New York, NY, 16 October 2015; Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon, ‘Declining Competition and Investment in the U.S.’, NBER Working Paper No. 23583, July 2017.

18See Jan De Loecker and Jan Eeckhout, ‘The Rise of Market Power and the Macroeconomic Implications’, NBER Working Paper No. 23687, August 2017; Jan De Loecker and Jan Eeckhout, ‘Global Market Power’, NBER Working Paper No. 24768, June 2018.

19 See Barkai, ‘Declining Labor’.

20World Inequality Report 2018, originally presented at the inaugural WID.world conference at the Paris School of Economics on 14 December.

21 Oxfam Briefing Paper, ‘Public Good or Private Wealth’, published January 2019.

22 Leader article, ‘Overhaul tax for the 21st century’, The Economist, 9 August 2018.

23 Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, ‘Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data’, NBER Working Paper No. 20625, October 2014.

24 Josh Bivens, ‘The Top 1 Percent’s Share of Income from Wealth has Been Rising for Decades’, Economic Policy Institute, 23 April 2014.

25 Edward N. Wolff, ‘Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962 to 2016: Has Middle Class Wealth Recovered?’, NBER Working Paper No. 24085, November 2017.

26 Joshua Gans et al., ‘Inequality and Market Concentration, When Shareholding is More Skewed than Consumption’, NBER Working Paper No. 25395, December 2018.

27 Sean F. Ennis, Pedro Gonzaga and Chris Pike, ‘The Effects Of Market Power On Inequality’, Competition Policy International, 14 October 2017.

28 Gabriel Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, University of Chicago Press, 2015, p. 40.

29 William Lazonick, ‘The Functions of the Stock Market and the Fallacies of Shareholder Value’, Institute for New Economic Thinking, Working Paper Series No. 58, June 2017.

30 Global Justice Now, ‘69 of the richest 100 entities on the planet are corporations, not governments, figures show’, 17 October 2018.

31Mordecai Kurz, ‘On the Formation of Capital and Wealth: IT, Monopoly Power and Rising Inequality’, SIEPR Working Paper No. 17–016, 25 June 2017.

32 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, 2014.

33 Philip Mirowski and Rob Van Horn, ‘The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism’, in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds), The Road From Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Harvard University Press, 2015, pp. 139‒80.

34 Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon, ‘The Failure of Free Entry’, NBER Working Paper No. 26001, June 2019.

35 US Council of Economic Advisers, ‘Benefits of Competition and Indicators of Market Power’, Issue Brief, April 2016.

36 Leader article, ‘The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data’, The Economist, 6 May 2017.

37 Diane Coyle, ‘Practical competition policy implications of digital platforms’, Bennett Institute for Public Policy Working Paper No. 01/2018, March 2018.

38 Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, Simon & Schuster, 2019, p. xviii.