Are superstar firms and Amazon effects reshaping the economy?

The biggest firms may be influencing inflation and wage growth, possibly at the expense of central bankers' power to do so

Two of the most important economic facts of the last few decades are that more industries are being dominated by a handful of extraordinarily successful companies and that wages, inflation and growth have remained stubbornly low.

Many of the world’s most powerful economic policymakers are now taking seriously the possibility that the first of those facts is a cause of the second — and that the growing concentration of corporate power has confounded the efforts of central banks to keep economies healthy.

Mainstream economists are discussing questions like whether “monopsony” — the outsize power of a few consolidated