This paper characterizes price competition between an expert and a non-expert. In contrast with the expert, the non-expert’s repair technology is not always successful. Consumers visit the expert after experiencing an unsuccessful match at the non-expert. This re-entry affects the behaviour of...

The Riegle-Neal Act in the US and the Economic and Monetary Union in Europe are recent initiatives to stimulate financial integration. These initiatives allow new entrants to ‘poach’ the incumbents' clients by offering them attractive loan offers. We show that these deregulations may be...

Regulators have recently shown an increased sensitivity to the issue of price squeezes, especially telecom regulators in European countries. This Paper analyses the relevance and the scope of price squeeze tests as proposed by practitioners and economists, taking the existing regulatory...

Two important characteristics of current equity markets are the large number of trading venues with publicly displayed order books and the substantial fraction of trading that takes place in the dark, outside such visible order books. This paper evaluates the impact of dark trading and...

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...

We propose a heteroscedastic regression model to identify the determinants of the dispersion in interest rates on loans granted to small and medium sized enterprises. We interpret unexplained deviations as evidence of the banks’ discretionary use of market power in the loan rate setting...

Since 1990, London’s SEAQ International attracts considerable trading volume in Belgian equities. This paper uses transaction, quotation and limit order book data to investigate competition between the Brussels CATS market and SEAQ International. It focuses in more detail on the liquidity...

A quality improvement often necessitates modifications of varietal product features. This paper studies firms’ incentives to provide quality when this decision affects the goods’ degree of horizontal differentiation. Intuitively, one is inclined to argue that private incentives to provide...

Credit contracts are non-exclusive. A string of theoretical papers shows that nonexclusivity generates important negative contractual externalities. Employing a unique dataset, we identify how the contractual externality stemming from the non-exclusivity of credit contracts affects credit...

We study the relation between liquidity in financial markets and post-trading fees (i.e. clearing and settlement fees). The clearing and settlement agent (CSD) faces different marginal costs for different types of transactions. Costs are lower for an internalized transaction, i.e. when buyer and...