Rising markups, common ownership, and technological capacities

This paper analyses the impact of common ownership on markups and innovation and adds to the discussion of the recently observed patterns of a long term rise in market power. Using a panel of European manufacturing firms from 2005 to 2016, we structurally infer markups and construct a measure of common ownership. We use a propensity score reweighting estimator to eliminate biases due to observational characteristics and find an increase of firm markups ranging up to 3.3% on average in industries with high technological spillovers after the first exposure to common ownership. For companies directly held by common institutional investors, we also measure a positive effect on citation-weighted patents of up to 9.6% in high-spillover industries on average. Both findings are consistent with recent theoretical findings in López and Vives (2019).