IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/restud/v92y2025i2p737-771..html

U.S. Market Concentration and Import Competition

Author

Listed:
  • Mary Amiti
  • Sebastian Heise

Abstract

Many studies have documented that the sales concentration of U.S. producers has risen in recent decades. In this article, we show that this increase was accompanied by more entry and growth of foreign competitors. Using confidential census data covering the universe of all firm sales in the U.S. manufacturing sector, we find that rising import competition increased concentration among U.S. firms by reallocating sales from smaller to larger U.S. firms and by causing firm exit. However, this increase in production concentration was counteracted by the expansion of foreign firms, which reduced domestic firms’ share of the U.S. market inclusive of foreign firms’ sales. We find that once the sales of foreign exporters are taken into account, U.S. market concentration in manufacturing was stable between 1992 and 2012.

Suggested Citation

  • Mary Amiti & Sebastian Heise, 2025. "U.S. Market Concentration and Import Competition," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 92(2), pages 737-771.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:92:y:2025:i:2:p:737-771.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/restud/rdae045
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tu, Wei & He, Juan, 2025. "How corporate business similarity affects ESG Performance?," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    2. Gábor Koltay & Szabolcs Lorincz & Tommaso Valletti, 2023. "Concentration and Competition: Evidence From Europe and Implications For Policy1," Journal of Competition Law and Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 19(3), pages 466-501.
    3. Meng Li & Yang Xu, 2025. "The Impact of Computing Infrastructure Construction on Innovation in Manufacturing Enterprises: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment Based on the Establishment of China’s National Supercomputing C," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 17(19), pages 1-23, October.
    4. Anders Akerman, 2024. "Market concentration and the relative demand for college‐educated labour," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 91(361), pages 292-319, January.
    5. Crinò, Rosario & Bonfiglioli, Alessandra & Gancia, Gino, 2021. "International Trade with Heterogeneous Firms: Theory and Evidence," CEPR Discussion Papers 16249, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    6. Rafael Guntin & Federico Kochen, 2025. "The Origins of Top Firms," Working Papers 2541, Banco de España.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • F14 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Empirical Studies of Trade
    • F60 - International Economics - - Economic Impacts of Globalization - - - General
    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:92:y:2025:i:2:p:737-771.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/restud .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.