Competition authorities all over the world worry that integration between search engines (mainly Google) and publishers could lead to abuses of dominant position.  In particular, one concern is that of own-content bias, meaning that Google would bias its rankings in favor of the publishers it...

This paper develops an asymmetric price setting oligopoly model of store opening and closure decisions in the UK supermarket industry which is estimated using a survey of consumer choices and a dataset of store characteristics. The model is used to examine the strategic local entry and exit...

We present a general Cournot model in which each firm may sell multiple quality-differentiated products. We use an upgrades approach, working not with the actual products, but instead with upgrades from one quality to the next. The properties of single-product Cournot models carry over to the...

China has sought to improve enterprise performance not through privatisation as in other transition economies, but through corporatisation as means of improving corporate governance. Actual governance practices of corporatised Chinese firms are however seriously defective, characterized by...

Was the London Stock Exchange (LSE) little more than a Dickensian den of speculation, or did it make a contribution to industrial development in Interwar Britain?  The interwar stock market laboured under problems of weak disclosure, inadequate investor protection and ineffective...

Economic theory points to five parties disciplining management of poorly performing firms: holders of large share blocks, acquirers of new blocks, bidders in takeovers, non-executive directors, and investors during periods of financial distress. This paper reports the first comparative...

This paper examines the relation between financial, corporate and legal systems, and economic performance in different countries. It reviews international comparisons that undertake detailed analyses of individual, developed countries and studies that use large, cross-country data banks,...

This paper attempts to address a puzzle in China's investment pattern: despite high aggregate investment and remarkable economic growth, negative net investment is commonly found at the microeconomic level.  Using a large firm-level dataset, we test three hypotheses to explain the existence and...

China has sought to improve enterprise performance not through privatisation as in other transition economies, but through corporatisation as means of improving corporate governance. Actual governance practices of corporatised Chinese firms are however seriously defective, characterized by...

In this paper we examine how the quantity of information generated about firm prospects can be improved by splitting a firm’s cash flow into a ‘safe’ claim (debt) and a ‘risky’ claim (equity). The former, being relatively...