The aim of the study is to explain if the foreclosure effect on prices is explained by a lower quality of foreclosed houses, which is a crucial aspect in the intelligibility of foreclosures. Based on a novel and comprehensive dataset, we estimate the impact of foreclosure on home prices in...

Will telecommunications policy in the form of industry-specific regulation go away? A literature review of the five policy areas (1) termination monopoly, (2) local bottleneck access, (3) net neutrality, (4) spectrum management, and (5) universal service suggests that in some of them a move to...

This paper analyses the effect of information disseminated by the Internet on voting behavior. We address endogeneity in Internet availability by exploiting regional and technological peculiarities of the preexisting voice telephony network that hinder the roll-out of fixed-line broadband...

This article reviews recent theoretical contributions on digital piracy. It starts by elaborating on the reasons for intellectual property protection, by reporting a few facts about copyright protection, and by examining reasons to become a digital pirate. Next, it provides an exploration of the...

Why do people who normally refrain from committing illegalities become digital pirates? In this paper we use a theoretical model of digital piracy combined with a game-theoretic mechanism of social norm formation to argue that no social stigma is attached to digital piracy because the latter has...

Currently, U.S. and EU telecommunications policies differ in many respects. For example, wholesale access to local loops is largely deregulated in the U.S. but continues to be regulated in the EU. Or, the U.S. has an elaborate universal service policy with a set of universal service funds and...

In this paper we develop a theory of patenting in which a firm preserves its reputation to only apply for a patent whenever a truly patentable idea has been generated. Firms have a short-run incentive to deviate and receive additional rents from unworthy pending patents, as well as potential...

The adequate pricing of intellectual property (“IP”) for tax reporting is a largely unsettled issue. Transactional profit-based methods are on the rise although only rated as “methods of last resort” by the OECD. This paper focuses on regulated profit splitting and compares this transfer...

Continued lobbying by high-end, American designers for intellectual property-type fashion design protection has culminated in the proposed Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act, intended to introduce EU standards. Using a sequential, 2-firm, vertical differentiation framework,...

This paper studies the incentives that developing countries have to protect intellectual properties rights (IPR). On the one hand, free-riding on rich countries technology reduces their investment cost in R&D. On the other hand, firm that violates IPR cannot legally export in a country that...