We analyze government interventions to alleviate debt overhang among banks. Interventions generate two types of rents. Informational rents arise from opportunistic participation based on private information while macroeconomic rents arise from free riding. Minimizing informational rents is a...

We use survey data to study American households’ propensity to default when the value of their mortgage exceeds the value of their house even if they can afford to pay their mortgage (strategic default). We find that 26% of the existing defaults are strategic. We also find that no household...

Exclusive dealing contracts between manufacturers and retailers force new entrants to set up their own costly dealer networks to enter the market. We ask whether such contracts may act as an entry barrier, and provide an empirical analysis of the European car market. We first estimate a demand...

In the presence of uncertainty about what a country can be good at producing, there can be great social value to discovering costs of domestic activities because such discoveries can be easily imitated. We develop a general-equilibrium framework for a small open economy to clarify the analytical...

This paper assesses the coherence between industrial policy, competition policy and trade policy in the European Union (EU). This assessment is undertaken from the perspective of the optimal deployment of economic policies as prescribed by economic analysis and takes into consideration the legal...

We start from an aggregate random coefficients nested logit (RCNL) model to provide a systematic comparison between the tractable logit and nested logit (NL) models with the computationally more complex random coefficients logit (RC) model. We first use simulated data to assess possible...

This Paper starts from a recent case studying how merger analysis in Europe may potentially be improved through simulation analysis. Starting from the product and geographic market definition in the Merger Decision, we formulate and estimate an oligopoly model with differentiated products. The...

The lemons model assumes that owners of used cars have an informational advantage over potential buyers with respect to the quality of their vehicles. Owners of bad cars will try to sell them to unsuspecting buyers while owners of good cars will hold on to theirs. Consequently, the quality of...

This Paper focuses on a single simple stylized fact which stands out from the post-war history of the US Car industry, namely that industry concentration fell just at the same time as industry advertising expenditures rose sharply. Since both events were almost certainly caused by the entry and...

This Paper studies the criteria with which the presence or absence of ‘subsidy’ in sales contingent Launch Aid R&D support may be determined when payoff-relevant market incompleteness limits the precision of market-based pricing to non-trivial intervals. The criteria currently employed in...