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Papers written by Author(s): 'Bruce Blonigen'

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  • Working Paper

    Evidence for the Effects of Mergers on Market Power and Efficiency

    January 2016

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-16-43

    Study of the impact of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on productivity and market power has been complicated by the difficulty of separating these two effects. We use newly-developed techniques to separately estimate productivity and markups across a wide range of industries using confidential data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Employing a difference-in-differences framework, we find that M&As are associated with increases in average markups, but find little evidence for effects on plant-level productivity. We also examine whether M&As increase efficiency through reallocation of production to more efficient plants or through reductions in administrative operations, but again find little evidence for these channels, on average. The results are robust to a range of approaches to address the endogeneity of firms' merger decisions.
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  • Working Paper

    Are All Trade Protection Policies Created Equal? Empirical Evidence for Nonequivalent Market Power Effects of Tariffs and Quotas

    September 2010

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-10-27

    The steel industry has been protected by a wide variety of trade policies, both tariff- and quota-based, over the past decades. This extensive heterogeneity in trade protection provides the opportunity to examine the well-established theoretical literature predicting nonequivalent effects of tariffs and quotas on domestic firms' market power. Robust to a variety of empirical specifications with U.S. Census data on the population of U.S. steel plants from 1967-2002, we find evidence for significant market power effects for binding quota-based protection, but not for tariff-based protection. There is only weak evidence that antidumping protection increases market power.
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