A competition-friendly business regulatory environment is essential for the well-functioning of markets. It ensures that important policy goals are addressed, and market failures tackled. However, regulation can also create barriers to the entry and expansion of firms that may limit and distort...

This paper reviews trends, outcomes and issues in regulatory reform in OECD countries. First, it summarises the evidence on the evolution of regulatory environments and the economy-wide and sectoral effects of reforms (including privatisation) in both competitive and non-competitive industries...

The paper looks at patterns of regulation in service industries and explores their implications for service performance. Focusing on restrictions to market mechanisms, a map of the state of service regulation in OECD countries is provided, based on data recently collected and summarised by the...

India's financial sector reforms, introduced in 1992, may have influenced the performance of commercial banks through a variety of channels. The present study is an attempt to examine the efficiency levels of Indian banks for the period 1985–2004. We employ stochastic frontier analysis to...

This essay discusses some things we have learned about markets, in the process of designing marketplaces to fix market failures. To work well, marketplaces have to provide thickness, i.e. they need to attract a large enough proportion of the potential participants in the market; they have to...

In a model of evolution driven by conflict between societies more powerful states have an advantage. When the influence of outsiders is small we show that this results in a tendency to hegemony. In a simple example in which institutions differ in their "exclusiveness" we find that these...

Motivated by a novel stylized fact - countries with isolated capital cities display worse quality of governance - we provide a framework of endogenous institutional choice based on the idea that elites are constrained by the threat of rebellion, and that this threat is rendered less effective by...