, , and , “ Intangibles and Industry Concentration: A Cross-Country Analysis,” Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 88, no. 2 (2026): 258–274, https://doi.org/10.1111/obes.12659.
gives us the following
"we use cross-country firm-level panel data for 11 European countries, plus Japan and the United States, between 2002 and 2017, to construct new measures of concentration at the country-industry-year level. We then link these to country-industry level measures of intangible investment"
"Our econometric results confirm descriptive evidence (Figure 1) indicating that changes in industry concentration are strongly related to intangible investment intensity, particularly in innovation, data and software. The estimates are relatively large: a 1-standard deviation increase in intangible investment (as a share of value added) is associated with a 1.5 percentage point increase in concentration over the next 4 years.7 This corresponds to about a third of the observed concentration increase in the average country and industry. The relationship between concentration and intangibles appears to be similar across the United States, Japan and European countries. It is robust to instrumental variable (IV) estimation, with instruments based on intangible investment in other countries and changes in policy, that is, R&D tax incentives."
