Infographic A Special Generation of US Companies Remains on Top

A small group of big companies tend to play an outsize role in the US economy. Where do such companies come from, and how do they become so influential? Seeking to answer these questions, a team of researchers that includes Chicago Booth’s Yueran Ma focused on three lists—from 1917, 1955, and 2018—that ranked the top companies. The researchers collected further information about the ranked companies from corporate websites, regulatory filings, and other sources.

A surprising pattern emerged: In the industrial sector, many of the companies on the 2018 list were founded about a century ago. The researchers find that this cohort of companies, a group they call a “special generation,” emerged during the Second Industrial Revolution, when adoption costs for new, capital-intensive, and highly scalable technology fell sharply. Companies that arose during this pivotal period were able to adopt the technology right away, and they gained efficiencies as they learned by doing. The cohort retained its early-adoption advantage, allowing its dominance to persist even 100 years later.