IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ecinqu/v30y1992i1p177-93.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Imperfect Competition and Business Cycles: An Empirical Investigation

Author

Listed:
  • Lebow, David E

Abstract

Does imperfect competition increase the magnitude of business cycles? If so, the variability of an industry's employment and output should be positively related to the market power of firms in that industry. This paper demonstrates that the opposite is true: U.S. manufacturing industries with high price-cost margins display less employment variability than do low-markup industries. These high-markup industries display less price variability as well. Highly concentrated industries, however, do display more employment variability. To some degree, markups may reflect labor hoarding rather than market power; this may account for part, but not all, of the negative correlation between markups and variability. Copyright 1992 by Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Lebow, David E, 1992. "Imperfect Competition and Business Cycles: An Empirical Investigation," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 30(1), pages 177-193, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ecinqu:v:30:y:1992:i:1:p:177-93
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Amable, Bruno & Gatti, Donatella, 2000. "Is perfection optimal? Employment and product market competition," Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Economic Change and Employment FS I 00-304, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
    2. Daniel Ryan, 2000. "Fluctuations in productivity growth rates and input utilization in U.S. manufacturing," Atlantic Economic Journal, Springer;International Atlantic Economic Society, vol. 28(2), pages 150-163, June.
    3. Hervani, Aref A., 2005. "Can oligopsony power be measured? The case of U.S. old newspapers market," Resources, Conservation & Recycling, Elsevier, vol. 44(4), pages 343-380.
    4. Amable, Bruno & Gatti, Donatella, 2001. "The Impact of Product Market Competition on Employment and Wages," IZA Discussion Papers 276, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    More about this item

    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:oup:ecinqu:v:30:y:1992:i:1:p:177-93. 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/weaaaea.html .

    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.