Monopoly Myths: Is Concentration Leading to Fewer Start-Ups?

In the last few years, a number of pundits, advocates, and journalists have argued that market concentration has grown in the United States and that this has caused a precipitous decline in the number of business start-ups. In this narrative, “monopoly” is a sclerotic scourge, robbing the economy of its traditional dynamism and leading to a host of problems, including less innovation and slower job growth. But there is no statistical relationship between start-up creation and change in concentration by industry; high-growth start-up activity is healthy.