Many countries with national health care providers and health insurances regulate the market for pharmaceuticals to steer drug demand and to control expenses. For example, they introduce reference pricing or tiered co-payments to enhance drug substitution and competition. Since 2006, Germany...

We develop a model for two-sided markets with consumers and producers, who interact through a platform. Typical settings for the model are the market for smartphones with phone users, app producers, and smartphone operating systems; or the video game market with game players, video game...

When Apple entered the ebook market, prices rose. A recent court decision found Apple guilty of colluding with publishers, blaming the price hike, in part, on agency agreements and prohibiting their use. Building a model to compare these with traditional wholesale agreements, we identify a...

This paper studies unshrouding decisions in a framework similar to Gabaix and Laibson (2006), but considers an alternative unshrouding mechanism where the impact of advertising add-on information depends on the number of unshrouding firms. We show that shrouding becomes less prevalent as the...

We study the effect of a merger in a dynamic high-technology industry - the videogame market - which is characterized by frequent introduction of new products. To assess the impact of the merger between two large specialist retailers in the UK, we perform a difference-in-differences analysis...

This paper empirically evaluates the price effects of the merger of two major book retail chains in the UK: Waterstone's and Ottakar's. We employ differences-in-differences techniques and use a rich dataset containing monthly scanner data information on a sample of 200 books sold in 60 stores in...

The paper provides empirical evidence for the causal impact of broadband Internet on firms' labour productivity and realised process and product innovations. The analysis refers to the early phase of DSL expansion in Germany from 2001 to 2003, when roughly 60 percent of the German firms already...

This paper analyzes the effects of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on the innovation of European firms. The results indicate a considerable increase in post-acquisition innovation in the merged entity. This is mainly driven by inventors based in the acquirer's country, while...

This paper tests whether upstream R&D cooperation leads to downstream collusion. We consider an oligopolistic setting where firms enter in research joint ventures (RJVs) to lower production costs or coordinate on collusion in the product market. We show that a sufficient condition for...

Financial constraints are an important impediment to the growth of small businesses. We study theoretically and empirically how the financial constraints of agents affect their decisions to exert effort, and, hence the organizational decisions and growth of principals, in the context of...