Three essays on market concentration and technological change

• Ano de defesa: 2020
• Autor(a) principal: Ana Carolina Bottega de Lima
• Orientador(a): Rafael Saulo Marques Ribeiro
• Banca de defesa: João Prates Romero, Gilberto Tadeu Lima, Esther Dweck
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Economia
• Departamento: FACE - FACULDADE DE CIENCIAS ECONOMICAS
• País: Brasil
• Palavras-chave em Português: Market concentration; Technological change; Income distribution; Markups; Panel VAR
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/39433

The decline of competition in many advanced economies and its effects on investment, productivity, and inequality have recently gained some attention, but most of the existing work relegates some important aspects of this process. This dissertation aims to resume the study of market concentration arguing that it can be better understood through its central, although intricate, relationship with technological change. By doing so, we provide contributions to the theoretical and empirical literature. Based on the combination of insights from the neo-Schumpeterian approach to technological innovation and the post-Keynesian demand-led literature, we formulate two dynamic models, a micro and a macro one. The micro model involves two Ąrms and an explicit two-way relationship between market concentration and technological change. The macro model, in turn, incorporates recent evidence on market concentration and its relationship with capital accumulation and income distribution. In the empirical part of the dissertation, we investigate if there is a simultaneous determination in the relationship between market power and technological capabilities for a sample of 131 countries that extends over the period 1990-2017. This investigation is carried out with the panel Vector Autoregressive (VAR) methodology. In general, we notice that technological change is an important addition to the analysis of market concentration, allowing us to identify nuances of how to boost or counteract concentration tendencies. A common feature of both the micro and macro models is that their stability depends largely on the interactions between technological change, imitation, and concentration. Besides, our empirical results provide evidence only that technological innovation affects market power, but not the other way around. Thus, this study reinforces that concentration and the increase in market power are worrisome trends that do not seem to promote innovation and do not match strategies focused either on growth or income distribution.