The centralised wage agreements have helped to contain inflation. There is evidence that wage increases were more moderate when a central agreement was concluded than in periods when no central agreement was reached. Nevertheless, there is also evidence that centralised wage setting has had some...

Using survey-based measures of future U.S. economic activity from the Livingston Survey and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we study how changes in expectations and their interaction with monetary policy contribute to fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates. We find that changes in...

The landmark Waxman-Hatch Act of 1984 represented a "grand compromise" legislation that sought to balance incentives for innovation by establishing finite periods of market exclusivity yet simultaneously providing access to lower cost generics expeditiously following patent expiration. Here we...

I explore the effect of the structure of the banking market on the performance of manufacturing sectors. The theoretical papers offer ambiguous explanations regarding the effects of banking market structure on the size of manufacturing sectors, and empirical studies that use cross country data...

Cross-country variability in regulatory frameworks, industrial policy, physician/pharmacy autonomy, brand/generic distinctions, and in the practice of medicine contributes to ambiguous interpretations of pharmaceutical cost comparisons. Here we report cross-country comparisons that: (i) focus on...

We develop a model of vertical innovation in which firms incur a market entry cost and position themselves in the quality space. Once established, firms compete monopolistically, selling to consumers with heterogeneous tastes for quality. We establish existence and uniqueness of the pricing game...

In US vaccine markets, competing producers with high fixed, sunk costs face relatively concentrated demand. The resulting price and quality competition leads to the exit of all but one or very few producers per vaccine. Our empirical analysis of exits from US vaccine markets supports the...

This paper rigorously investigates the determinants of bank competition for 146 countries over the sample period 1999–2011. The results employing both the Lerner index and the Boone indicator, reveal the distinctive characteristics of the competition drivers across different income groups of...

In this survey chapter on pricing and reimbursement in U.S. pharmaceutical markets, we first provide background information on important federal legislation, institutional details regarding distribution channel logistics, definitions of alternative price measures, related historical...