Antitrust and corporate taxation

Although citizens value competitive markets and support small businesses, we observe substantial variation in market concentration. Why do politicians abstain from taking action to reduce concentration? We propose an often overlooked political benefit to concentrated markets: When concentration increases, competition is less pronounced and firms earn larger profits. These profits can be taxed for government revenue or used to reward business-friendly politicians. We expect politicians to impose more lenient competition policies toward firms that provide larger sources of revenue. Moreover, this relationship should be especially strong under authoritarian political institutions, where politicians only weakly value the free market and consumer outcomes and where institutional commitments to unbiased policies are weak. We derive our theoretical claims from a formal model. We draw on both cross-country evidence and evidence from Turkey at the firm and industry level to evaluate our claims. We find that as political institutions become less representative, firms that make higher tax payments tend to control more assets, operate in more concentrated industries, and engage in higher value M&As. Our study points to the weak provision of competition policies as a source of rent-seeking.