Business Concentration around the World: 1900-2020

We thank Jaedo Choi, Andrei Levchenko, Dimitrije Ruzic, and Younghun Shim for generously sharing data on top shares in South Korea, and staff members at the statistical offices of Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Singapore, Switzerland, and the U.K. for their kind help with data inquiries. We also thank Lawrence Jin, Julia Shephard, and Wei Wei for kindly helping us obtain Australian and U.K. historical publications. We are grateful to Fatin Alia Ali, Geneve Bullo, Chun Hei Hung, Nurul Amin Khan, Howard Guankun Li, Aria Yaxuan Liu, Haomin Qin, Faisal Quaiyyum, and Sheena Flor Samonte for excellent research assistance. We appreciate helpful suggestions from Serguey Braguinsky, Nico Crouzet, Ed Glaeser, John Haltiwanger, Danial Lashkari, Joachim Hubmer, Huiyu Li, Eric Monnet, Christina Patterson, Raghu Rajan, Filip Rozsypal, Yongs Shin, Andrei Shleifer, Chad Syverson, Nico Trachter, Rob Vishny, Eric Zwick, as well as seminar participants at Antwerp, Boston College, Boston Fed, Brazilian Finance Meeting, Brown, Chicago Booth, Chicago Law and Economics Workshop, CREI/UPF, Dallas Fed, HKU, HKUST, Melbourne, Minneapolis Fed, Nanyang Technological University, NBER EFG meeting, NBER Megafirms and the Economy Meeting, Purdue Daniels, Queensland University of Technology, Richmond Fed, San Francisco Fed, SED, St Louis Fed, Sveriges Riksbank, UIUC, UNSW, and USC Marshall. We acknowledge generous financial support by the NSF CAREER award. First draft: June 2024. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.