We study an inflow of buyers who are less elastic because they lack both time and information. Theory predicts that sellers increase prices to expand surplus appropriation, even if marginal costs are non-increasing, but this effect weakens as market competition intensifies. Data from Italian...

Switching costs are a key determinant of market performance. This paper tests their existence in the corporate loan market in which they are likely to play a central role because of the complexity of contracts and informational problems. Using very detailed data at bank-firm level on four...

We examine the determinants of entry into Italian local banking markets during the period 1991-2002 and build a simple model in which the probability of branching in a new market depends on the features of both the local market and the potential entrant. Our econometric findings show that, all...

Is deregulation sufficient to grant free entry in local credit markets? Economic theory suggests at least two ways in which asymmetric information between incumbents and entrants can work as an endogenous barrier to entry. First, entrants� pool of applicants contains a larger share of...

This paper investigates the markup of price over marginal cost in Italian manufacturing branches. The approach used is an extension of Hall�s model that addresses some measurement shortcomings and theoretical limitations that may affect this class of model. The hypothesis of perfect...

High-speed Internet, or broadband, access is an essential infrastructure that has been proven to stimulate competition, productivity and growth and it is considered the engine of the so called knowledge-information economy. In this paper, we first provide a technical survey of the standard...

The European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is a cap and trade system to curb CO2 emissions. It has caused both direct costs (CO2 allowances) and indirect costs (higher electricity prices) to energy-intensive industries. Moreover, as there is no global CO2 agreement, the ETS could distort the...

Vertical integration followed by quantity competition is studied. In the first stage of the game downstream firms simultaneously decide whether to integrate with one of the upstream suppliers. If firms are not able to observe whether their vertically integrated competitor enters the...

This paper summarizes the results attained by the Eurosystem in harmonizing the statistics used for the conduct of monetary policy. Since the creation of the euro area, in January 1999, significant progress has been made in the harmonization of data on banks’ balance sheets, central banks and...

In this paper we test for the potential bias in the estimated contribution of a supply restriction on lending to enterprises, as captured by the assessment of credit standards provided by the banks participating in the Eurosystem Bank Lending Survey (BLS banks). For Italy, we combine the...