Jan Eeckhout

“The most shocking observation is that the median markup, the markup of the firm exactly in the middle of the distribution, has remained unchanged. This tells us that for at least half of the firms, there has been no rise in markups at all! Yet, at the same time, markups for a few firms have grown outlandishly. The ninetieth percentile of the markup distribution—those firms with the highest markups—has grown from 1.5 in 1980 to a whopping 2.5 in 2016. Ten percent of the firms now sell their goods 250 percent above cost!”
― Jan Eeckhout, The Profit Paradox: How Thriving Firms Threaten the Future of Work

“The rise in wage inequality that we observe is mainly driven by the increase in inequality between firms, with some firms paying high wages to all their highly productive workers whose work is scalable and other firms paying low wages to their workers who perform menial services. While inequality between firms has increased, there is little increase in inequality in wages within firms. The top 1 percent worker now earns on average twenty times more than the bottom 99 percent worker in the same firm, which is only slightly higher than what it was in 1980. Nonetheless, there has been a much sharper increase in wage inequality economy-wide, and more than two-thirds of that rise in wage inequality is due to the increase in inequality between firms.”
― Jan Eeckhout, The Profit Paradox: How Thriving Firms Threaten the Future of Work