We analyze the effects of different types and concentration of ownership on performance using a population of firms in a model transition economy after mass privatization. Specifications based on first-differences and unusual instrumental variables show that contrary to conventional wisdom, the...

We analyze the effect of ownership on post-privatization performance in a virtually complete population of medium and large firms privatized in a model large-scale privatization economy (Czech Republic). We find that concentrated foreign ownership improves economic performance, but domestic...

We study the economic impacts of the interaction between a regulator's Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection policy against software piracy on the one side and the forms of IPR protection that software producers may themselves undertake to protect their intellectual property on the other...

As part of the Single Market Program the European Commission commanded the liberalization and regulatory harmonization of utilities, transport and telecommunication services. This paper investigates whether and how this process affected the productivity of European network firms. Exploiting the...

The standard price competition of two or more players leads to Bertrand equilibrium in basic economic theory (if complete information is assumed, there are no capacity constraints, etc.). In reality, even on highly competitive Internet-based markets, the prices of seemingly undifferentiated...

We introduce an intra-industry setup in order to reconsider the consequences of government (in)ability to precommit to its policies when it is constrained to only one policy instrument (second-best policies). This setup nests the standard frameworks of strategic trade policy—the...

Two software developers, each offering a product variety of different (exogenously given) quality, compete in prices for heterogeneous users who choose from purchasing a legal version, using an illegal copy, and not using a product at all. Using an illegal version violates intellectual property...

Economies have markedly different firm size distributions. At the same time, firms of different size grow differently after identical financial- and product-market liberalization reforms. Thus, identical reforms can produce different growth outcomes across countries. This result is reached after...

In this paper we study how an exogenous expense of owning a market good affects the equilibrium outcome in a market with vertical product differentiation i.e. consumers differ by income but have identical preferences for the good’s quality. We identify three possible subgame-perfect...

We study how the strength of public intellectual property rights (IPR) protection against software piracy (copyright protection) affects private IPR protection (that software developers may themselves undertake to protect their IPR). There are two software developers that offer a product variety...