Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Marina Halac • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Nov, 2025, Volume 93, Issue 6

Consumer Surplus from Suppliers: How Big is it and Does it Matter for Growth?

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA22672
p. 2043-2081

David Baqaee|Ariel Burstein|Cédric Duprez|Emmanuel Farhi

Consumer surplus, the area between the demand curve and the price, plays a key role in many models of trade and growth. Quantifying it typically requires estimating and extrapolating demand curves. This paper provides an alternative approach to measuring consumer surplus by focusing on firms as consumers of inputs. We show that the elasticity of a downstream firm's marginal cost to supplier additions and separations measures the downstream firm's consumer surplus relative to its input costs. Using Belgian data and instrumenting for changes in supplier access, we find that for every 1% of suppliers gained or lost, the marginal cost of downstream firms falls or rises by roughly 0.3%. Our estimates are directly informative about the strength of love‐of‐variety effects and the gains from movements along quality ladders. We use our microeconomic estimates of consumer surplus to assess the macroeconomic importance of supplier additions and separations in a growth accounting framework. We find that supplier churn plausibly accounts for about half of aggregate productivity growth.


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Supplemental Material

Supplement to "Consumer Surplus from Suppliers: How Big is it and Does it Matter for Growth?"

David Baqaee, Ariel Burstein, Cédric Duprez, and Emmanuel Farhi

This supplement contains material not found within the manuscript.

Supplement to "Consumer Surplus from Suppliers: How Big is it and Does it Matter for Growth?"

David Baqaee, Ariel Burstein, Cédric Duprez, and Emmanuel Farhi

The replication package for this paper is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15773758. The authors were granted an exemption to publish parts of their data because either access to these data is restricted or the authors do not have the right to republish them. However, the authors included in the package, on top of the codes and the parts of the data that are not subject to the exemption, a simulated or synthetic dataset that allows running the codes. The Journal checked the data and the codes for their ability to generate all tables and figures in the paper and approved online appendices. Whenever the available data allowed, the Journal also checked for their ability to reproduce the results. However, the synthetic/simulated data are not designed to produce the same results.