Declining Dynamism, Increasing Markups and Missing Growth: The Role of the Labor Force

A growing body of empirical research highlights substantial changes in the US economy during the last three decades. Business dynamism – namely job reallocation, firm entry and creative destruction – is declining. Market power, as measured by markups and industry concentration, seems to be on the rise. Aggregate productivity growth is sluggish. We show that declines in the rate of growth of the labor force can qualitatively account for all of these features in a standard model of firm-dynamics. Despite its richness we can characterize the link between population growth and dynamism, markups and growth analytically. When we calibrate the model to the universe of U.S. Census data, the labor force channel can explain a large fraction of the aggregate trends.