European business services has witnessed about two decades of virtual productivity stagnation. The paper investigates whether this is caused by weak dynamic market selection. The time pattern of scale-related inefficiencies is used as an indicator for the effectiveness of market selection. We...

Presented is an evolutionary model of consumer non-durable markets, which is an extension of a previously published paper on consumer durables. The model suggests that the repurchase process is governed by preferential growth. Applying statistical methods it can be shown that in a competitive...

Mexican gas stations across the country buy and sell gasoline at regulated common prices. Therefore, authorities that set these prices do not take into account competition conditions of each market. In this paper we establish the effect of a regulated mark-up price as well as competition on the...

This paper explores whether asymmetric pricing can be identified in the eleven euro zone countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain) by utilizing Error Correction Model on the weekly price changes in order to assess current and...

An extensive empirical literature has documented the positive growth effects of equity market liberalization. However, this line of research ignores the impact of financial integration on a category of firms crucial for economic development, i.e. the small entrepreneurial firms. This paper aims...

This work is a PhD dissertation, written at the Department of Economics, McGill University. The thesis offers a new framework for inflation as a process of restructuring. Contrary to existing theories of inflation, which tend to take structure and institutions as given for the purpose of...

This Paper investigates the link between a firm’s competitive environment and the idiosyncratic volatility of its stock returns. We find that firms enjoying high market power, or established in concentrated industries, have lower idiosyncratic volatility. We posit that competition affects...

This paper analyses the effects of concentration on profitability in the US banking sector from 1994-2005, using bank-level panel data. A new index of concentration is proposed, which reflects the depth and intensity of concentration. The econometric specification facilitates the simultaneous...

Recent theoretical models argue that a bank’s organizational structure reflects its lending technology. A hierarchically organized bank will employ mainly hard information, whereas a decentralized bank will rely more on soft information. We investigate theoretically and empirically how bank...

This study analyses the interest margin in the principal European banking sectors (Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain) in the period 1993-2000 using a panel of 15,888 observations, identifying the fundamental elements affecting this margin. Our starting point is the methodology...