Abstract
Abstract In recent decades, market power has been on the rise, although its increase varies between sectors. We argue that this heterogeneity can be partially attributed to sector-specific differences in turbulence dynamics. Turbulence, a measure of firms’ churn over the revenue productivity distribution, reflects firms’ ability to sustain their productivity over time. In a dynamic oligopolistic competition model, an increase in turbulence accelerates the turnover of leaders, and triggers reallocation of market shares towards high-markup firms. The predictions of our model are consistent with empirical evidence from both the United States and Europe.