In this paper, I evaluate the impact of innovative activity of financial agents on their fragility in a competitive framework. There exist a vast array of concerns about the interconnection of financial innovations, financial distress of firms and financial crises provided by theoretical...

We consider a monopolistic supplier’s optimal choice of wholesale tariffs when downstream firms are privately informed about their retail costs. Under discriminatory pricing, downstream firms that differ in their ex ante distribution of retail costs are offered different tariffs. Under uniform...

While the previous literature on exclusive dealing has been concerned with the question of how exclusive dealing can raise static profits, this paper analyzes the question of how exclusive dealing can be used to predate in a dynamic context. It is shown that exclusive dealing may arise even if...

A government that wants to increase welfare by subsidizing either an industry’s sales or process innovations or both has to account for possible changes of production, when firms can foresee the government’s actions. In an optimal control framework welfare can be increased by subsidizing...

The outcome of non-binding reverse auctions critically depends on how information is distributed during the bidding process. We use data from a large European procurement platform to study the impact of different information structures, specifically the availability of quality information to the...

We analyse optimal pricing and quality of a monopolistic journal and the optimality of open access in a two-sided model. The predominant aspect of the model that determines the quality levels at which open access is optimal is the nature of the (non-linear) externalities between readers and...

We analyse trade between countries of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance in Eastern Europe between 1950 and 1990. Despite central planning and political motivation of the CMEA, we show that trade could be explained by standard demand factors surprisingly well. Moreover, we document that...

Trend extraction from time series is often performed by using the filter proposed by Leser (1961), also known as the Hodrick-Prescott filter. A practical problem arises, however, when some data points are missing. This note proposes a method for coping with this problem.

This note gives a fairly complete statistical description of the Hodrick-Prescott Filter (1997), originally proposed by Leser (1961). It builds on an approach to seasonal adjustment suggested by Leser (1963) and Schlicht (1981, 1984). A moments estimator for the smoothing parameter is proposed...

Trend extraction from time series is often performed by using the filter proposed by Leser (1961), also known as the Hodrick-Prescott filter. A practical problem arises, however, when the time series contains structural breaks (such as produced by German unification for German time series, for...