Empirical Industrial Organization: A Progress Report

Abstract

The article sketches how the field of industrial organization has evolved to its current state, in particular how the emphasis has shifted over time from attempts to relate aggregate measures across industries toward more focused studies of individual industries. The authors describe several active areas of inquiry, discuss some of the impacts of this research and specify topics where research efforts have been more or less successful. They also address some current debates about research emphasis in the field, and more broadly about empirical methods, and offer some ideas on where future research might go.