This paper discusses some puzzles in the contemporary macroeconomic scene in India, from the perspective of public finance and economic development. These include a fiscal deficit higher than it was during the 1991 crisis, but without a large current account deficit or rise in inflation or...

This article provides a defense of a sentence lifted from the Final Report of the United States Trade Deficit Review Commission. 'The savings shortfall argument falsely presumes that causation goes from savings to the trade deficit'. The savings shortfall argument is support by nothing more than...

This paper aims to look at the relationship between capital account openness and inflation in the 1990s. It argues that widespread capital account liberalization during the early 1990s appears to have contributed to the world-wide disinflation observed during that decade. The paper attempts to...

The existence of a ‘bidding market’ is commonly cited as a reason to tolerate the creation or maintenance of highly concentrated markets. We discuss three erroneous arguments to that effect: the ‘consultants’ fallacy’ that ‘market power is impossible’, the ‘academics’...

The ''portfolio effect theory'' developed by the European Commission in merger control is at the center of a fierce international row with the US authorities who believe that this theory has no economic foundations. This paper aims to provide a counter-argument and shows that full-line forcing...

In a model of sequential patent races, it is examined whether or not introducing a patent law in the home country is beneficial to the firms and the society as a whole given the foreign country already offers patent protection. Before the first patent race starts, the firms and the foreign...

This paper studies the welfare consequences of a government regulation that forces a patented equipment to be supplied by a number of independent producers. On the one hand, such a regulation hurts the value of a patent and therefore reduces activities in the R&D sector. On the other hand, the...

This paper considers the integration of competition policy and innovation policy in the context of R&D cooperation. An explicit comparison of the welfare losses under ex-ante and ex-post R&D cooperation reveals differing incentives to undertake R&D in both regimes. The strength of these...

In this study, the interaction between the competition-cooperation nexus and regulation in retail payment systems is analysed by applying the main lessons from the theory of network industries. This is justifiable on the grounds that the payment systems industry inherently has many...

When the home country introduces a patent law after the winner of the patent race is known the country's welfare may rise only if the domestic firm wins. If the home country decides before the patent race ends, the welfare may be increased when the probability that the domestic firm wins is...