Competition in an industry with an upstream natural monopoly infrastructure requires vertical separation. However, this cannot increase welfare unless marginal costs are reduced, given the advantages of vertical integration. It turns out that entry increases marginal costs and has ambiguous...

We add potential intrinsic motivation to an agency model that is applied on public ownership and privatisation. Conventional agency theory suggests private ownership to be superior if pay under public ownership is not performance-related, but the ranking is otherwise reversed. However, we...

I analyse the welfare impact of a mixed market with a private or public firm that is characterised by wider objectives or altruism, in the presence of an agency problem. Contrary to some earlier findings, the total surplus turns out to be increasing in the degree of altruism. This impact is...

Conventional models of a mixed oligopoly usually predict modest welfare improvements, because they are based on assumptions of increasing marginal costs and/or relative inefficiency in the public firm. Both assumptions can be questioned, but it is well known that the private firms would...

We analyze a base-broadening, rate-reducing, and simplifying tax reform, which may be revenue-neutral, or which may keep the average tax rates constant. Such a reform generally improves efficiency under reasonable conditions but not necessarily if the average tax rate is calculated on taxable...