Industrial concentration in a liberalising economy: A study of Indian manufacturing

This paper studies industrial concentration in Indian manufacturing sectors over the period 1970 to 1999. Given that Indian industry was highly regulated till the mid 1980s, the market structure in most manufacturing sectors was largely shaped by government policy. Deregulation after 1985 allowed greater scope for normal competitive processes, so that concentration levels should progressively be determined by industry characteristics rather than government policy. We find that, on the whole, concentration levels were indeed more significantly related to industry characteristics after deregulation. However, even after controlling for these characteristics, there is considerable heterogeneity in the patterns of concentration in individual industries.

Interdependency, Competition, and the Distribution of Firm and Industry Profits

Coordination of interdependencies among firms' productive activities has been advanced as a promising explanation for sustained heterogeneity in capabilities among firms. In this paper, we extend this line of research to determine the industry structures and patterns of expected firm profits for the case when difficulty optimizing interdependent activities does, in fact, generate and sustain capability heterogeneity among firms. We combine a widely used agent-based model where firms search to discover sets of activities that complement one another (reducing overall costs or raising product quality) with traditional economic models of competition among profit-maximizing firms. The agent-based model produces a distribution of performance (interpreted as variable cost or product quality) among firms and the competition models determine resulting industry outcomes including patterns of entry, exit, and profits. The integration of economic models of competition among firms with an agent-based model of search for improvement by firms reveals a rich relationship between interdependencies in production functions and industry structure, firm profits, and industry average profitability.dynamic capabilities, interdependencies, computational model, search

Business group affiliation and firm performance in a transition economy: A focus on ownership voids

Business group, Performance, Property rights theory, Institutional perspective, Transition economy,