I'm still smarting over the cat pee story.
A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2026:
ABSTRACT
In 2008, the aggregate market value of U.S.-listed firms was roughly one-third higher than that of European-listed firms. By 2023, it was more than 300% higher, a difference of $34 trillion. The valuation gap is broad-based, rather than concentrated among a few superstar firms, and is driven by differences in firm values, not in the number of listed firms. Across sectors, the gap is larger in R&D-intensive industries and in industries with high returns to scale. European firms’ size is strongly correlated with home-country GDP, whereas U.S. firms’ size is unrelated to home-state GDP. Smaller European firms also face a particularly large cost-of-capital gap and do not appear able to substitute debt for limited access to equity financing, including venture capital. Taken together, these facts suggest that financial and product-market frictions constrain European firms’ ability to scale.I. INTRODUCTION
In 2008, the aggregate value (market capitalization) of U.S. publicly listed firms exceeded that of European firms by a third. By 2023, the U.S. stock market value exceeded Europe’s by more than 300%. The gap has risen from 3 trillion to 34 trillion USD, more than the value of U.S. GDP. This divergence is not a matter of exchange rate movements or the current size of the economy: scaled by GDP, U.S. market capitalization rose from 78% to 177% between 2008 and 2023, while Europe’s rose from 43% to just 63%. It is not a reflection of migration by European firms: cross-listing explains little of the gap. Instead, the main driver is the addition of several generations of younger firms with immense growth potential (and, in several cases, the realization of that potential), and with very high valuations. This simply has not happened in Europe.
What explains the lower valuation of European firms? Differences in the number of
listed do not explain the value gap, which is entirely driven by an increase in the average value of U.S. firms relative to European firms, i.e. this is a valuation gap. The valuation gap does not reflect sectoral composition—the average within-sector (where sectors are defined using the 4-digit SIC taxonomy) U.S.-Europe gap is 50%, while the unconditional gap is 62%. It is not driven by a handful of superstar firms. Therefore, broad-based valuations differences drive behind the gap. When we examine how firms are valued, we find that the gap in value is largest among younger, and more R&D-intensive firms, and within industries where scale economies are important.1 The U.S.-Europe gap, in otherwords, is driven by growth opportunities: in the number, size, and quality of high-growth
firms.Our results are consistent with a technological change that has raised the returns to scale. Recent technologies—information technology, software, and intangible capital—disproportionately reward firms that can grow large (Bloom et al., 2012; Schivardi and Schmitz, 2020; Lashkari et al., 2024; De Ridder, 2024). Firms in the United States have adopted and exploited these technologies faster than European firms. A shift of this kind raises the value of exactly the firms where we find the largest differences: younger, smaller, R&D-intensive firms, and in industries where the winners can scale up quickly....
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