IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bon/boncrc/crctr224_2021_282.html

Markups for Consumers

Author

Listed:
  • Bernhard Ganglmair

  • Alexander Kann

  • Ilona Tsanko

Abstract

A central motivating factor for studying price markups is their effect on consumer welfare. Reported estimates of (firm-level) price markups in the literature, however, are often focused on industry or cross-country comparisons. These treat different industries equally rather than based on how relevant they are for consumers. We propose markup measures in which firm-level price markups are weighted according to consumption expenditures in the respective industries. Using a concordance table between consumption categories (otherwise used for the calculation of consumer price indices) and a firm's industry classification, we report results for Germany for the years 2002 through 2016. We find that consumption-weighted price markups are higher than the conventionally reported revenue-weighted markups. We further show that consumption-weighted markups have increased faster, in particular for medium-income households, which highlights a potential role of price markup as a contributing factor to changes of inequality in society.

Suggested Citation

  • Bernhard Ganglmair & Alexander Kann & Ilona Tsanko, 2021. "Markups for Consumers," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2021_282, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2021_282
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp282
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    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. Christopher Decker & Amit Zac & Carola Casti & Amédée von Moltke & Ariel Ezrachi, 2022. "Competition Law Enforcement and Household Inequality in the United Kingdom [The UK’s Wealth Distribution and Characteristics of High-Wealth Households]," Journal of Competition Law and Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 18(4), pages 922-952.
    2. Almut Balleer & Sebastian Link & Manuel Menkhoff & Peter Zorn, 2024. "Demand or Supply? Price Adjustment Heterogeneity during the COVID-19 Pandemic," International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 20(1), pages 93-157, February.
    3. Błażej, Mirosław & Górajski, Mariusz & Ulrichs, Magdalena, 2025. "Microdata-based output gap estimation using business tendency surveys," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 174(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • K21 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Antitrust Law
    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms
    • L40 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2021_282. 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: CRC Office (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.crctr224.de .

    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.