SMU SOE Economics Lecture Series (Nov 26, 2021, 4.00pm-6.00pm): Production Approach to Market Power

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Production Approach to Market Power

This course has the following objectives: (1) Make you familiar with the main questions and methodologies in Industrial Organization: The Production approach to Market Power; (2) Teach you how to critically evaluate empirical work in I.O. and to some extent applied micro; (3) Provide you with the tools to start your own research.The module is oriented towards empirical work, but the empirical work covered will typically have a close tie to a theoretical model. The session introduces the empirical framework of De Loecker and Warzynski (2012), and extensions, to measure markups using production data. This approach requires insights in production function estimation, and the essential ingredients will be discussed. In a second part we discuss the application of the production approach to recent questions of increasing concentration and market power.

JAN DE LOECKER

Professor of Economics

KU Leuven

Jan De Loecker is Professor of Economics at the KU Leuven, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, Research Associate at the NBER and a Research Fellow at the CEPR. He obtained his PhD in economics from KU Leuven in 2006. He was on the faculty at NYU from 2006-2008, before moving to Princeton University, where he was on the full-time faculty from 2008-2017 (tenured 2014-2017). He was a visiting faculty at Yale University and Stanford University. He specializes in the areas of industrial organization, international economics and development economics.

His research is centered around measuring, and identifying the drivers of firm performance. In particular, he has put forward empirical frameworks to estimate productivity, marginal costs and markups, using micro-level production data. These methods have been used to study the role of technology, market power, international competition, in shaping the performance of individual producers, and industries and economies at large. He has published in leading journals, such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and various field journals.

In 2016, he was awarded with an Odysseus Research Grant from the Flemish Research Council, and in 2019 he obtained a Consolidator ERC Grant for this project MPOWER.

De Loecker has advised various corporations, institutions and international agencies (such as the World Bank, and various national and central banks) on productivity and firm performance measurement, on the impact of trade/industrial policy on growth. His work has been referenced in all major news outlets (link).

Please view speaker's profile here.