The Evolution of U.S. Retail Concentration

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: Increases in national concentration have been a salient feature of industry dynamics in the U.S. and have contributed to concerns about increasing market power. Yet, local trends may be more informative about market power, particularly in the retail sector where consumers have traditionally shopped at nearby stores. We find that local concentration has increased almost in parallel with national concentration using novel Census data on product-level revenue for all U.S. retail stores. The increases in concentration are broad based, affecting most markets, products, and retail industries. We implement a new decomposition of the national Herfindahl Hirschman Index and show that despite similar trends, national and local concentration reflect different changes in the retail sector. The increase in national concentration comes from consumers in different markets increasingly buying from the same firms and does not reflect changes in local market power. We estimate a model of retail competition which links local concentration to markups. The model implies that the increase in local concentration explains one-third of the observed increase in markups.

Keywords: Retail; Local Markets; Concentration; Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-cwa, nep-ind, nep-pay, nep-reg and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2022/CES-WP-22-07.pdf First version, 2022 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Evolution of US Retail Concentration (2025)
Working Paper: The Evolution of U.S. Retail Concentration (2023)
Working Paper: The Evolution of U.S. Retail Concentration (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:22-07

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