The Economy of Bits Moved up One Layer: Capital Intensity, Value Capture, and the Compute Stack in the S&P 500, 2008–2025
Market-capitalization concentration in the Standard & Poor’s 500 (S&P 500) rose sharply between 2016 and 2025, and the explanation usually offered is the economy of bits: negligible marginal cost, network effects, and intangible capital are held to let a few firms scale without scaling their balance sheets. This paper...