We analyze the role of public support in the financing pattern of R&D in German SMEs and their assessment of financing conditions in the context of other framework conditions for innovation. In Germany, there is a diversity of overall well-funded technology-neutral and technology-specific...

Sub-Saharan Africa ranks among the top regions in terms of growth in the number of mobile phone users. The success of mobile telephony is attributed to the opening of markets for private players and lenient regulatory policy. However, markets may be increasingly saturated and new regulations...

We model competition between two unregulated mobile phone companies with price-elastic demand and less than full market coverage. We also assume that there is a regulated full-coverage fixed network. In order to induce stronger competition, mobile companies could have an incentive to raise their...

The impact of ICT on the efficiency of different national telecommunication industries of the US, Germany, France, the UK and the Netherlands is analysed by using a stochastic production possibility frontier approach. The relative inefficiencies of these industries measured as distances to the...

Despite the ongoing appetite of financial investors for merchant investments into the European electricity network, the EC is reluctant to approve such undertakings, thus implicitly favoring regulated investments. Based on a two-level model, we analyze the impact of profit-maximizing merchant...

This paper proposes an incentive mechanism for transmission expansion planning. The mechanism is a bilevel program. The upper level is a profit-maximizing transmission company (Transco) which expands its transmission system while endogenously predicts and influences the generation investment....

We investigate the welfare impact of parallel imports using a large panel data set containing monthly information on sales, ex-factory prices, and further product characteristics for all 700 anti-diabetic drugs sold in Germany between 2004 and 2010. We estimate a two-stage nested logit model of...

Many developing countries around the world apply progressive water tariffs, often structured in the form of discretely increasing block tariffs (IBTs). These tariffs have been criticized in the welfare economic literature due to their perceived inefficiency: many of the prices charged under IBTs...

This research presents an application of the Hogan, Rosellón and Vogelsang (2010) (HRV) mechanism to promote electricity transmission network expansion in the Peruvian electricity transmission system known as SEIN (Sistema Eléctrico Interconectado Nacional). The HRV mechanism combines the...

We consider a model with two firms operating their individual networks. Each firm can choose its price as well as its investment to build up its network. Assuming a skewed distribution of consumers, our model leads to an asymmetric market structure with one firm choosing higher investments....