Who Are America's Star Firms?

Ayyagari, Meghana ; Demirguc-Kunt, Asli ; Maksimovic, Vojislav

Washington, DC: World Bank

关键词: INEQUALITY;    RATE OF RETURN;    RETURN ON CAPITAL;    SKILLED LABOR;    INTANGIBLE CAPITAL;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-8534
RP-ID  :  WPS8534

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

There is wide spread concern about agrowing gap between top-performing publicly listed firms andthe rest of the economy and the implications of this forrising inequality in the U.S. Using conventional returncalculations, there is indeed a widening gap between starfirms (defined as those with top 10 percent of return oninvested capital in any year) and the rest of the economyover time, especially in industries that rely on a skilledlabor force. However, once measurement error in intangiblecapital is accounted for, this gap shrinks dramatically andhas not been widening over time. While pricing power, asmeasured by markups, predicts star firm status, a largefraction of star firms have low markups and there is noevidence that star firms are cutting output or investmentmore than other firms for the same markup. The effect ofstar status is persistent. Five years later, star firms havehigher growth, profits, and Tobin's Q. A subset ofexceptional firms may pose more pressing policy concernswith much higher returns and the potential to exercisemarket power in the future.