In this paper we analyze firms' ability to tacitly collude on pricesin an infinitely repeated duopoly game of vertical productdifferentiation. We show that firms collude if and only if their discountfactor is high enough, i.e. if they value future profits sufficiently. We alsoshow that a lower...

Competition has long been regarded as productivity enhancing. Understanding the mechanism by which competition affects innovation and productivity is therefore an important topic for economic policy. The main contribution of this paper is to disentangle the relationship between competition and...

This work presents a theoretical framework to study if the motive for money-transfers within families is altruism or exchange. We propose models which explicitly incorporate transfers on education as an additional family transfer. Our models allows us to discriminate between the two possible...

We study an overlapping generations economy with altruistic agents in which the productivity of a child?s labour endowment depends on an idiosyncratic shock and on the resources spent by her parent in education her. The parent cannot borrow but can leave a nonnegative bequest which earns a...

In this paper, we show that downstream mergers increase the incentives of an up-stream firm to invest in cost-reducing R&D. The upstream firm revenues increase with industry profits, which in turn increase with concentration downstream and this explains the positive link between concentration...

In the context of the recent electricity market reforms in Europe and the US, we evaluate the performance of the Spanish pool. Our method is not based on price-cost estimates but rather on the different behavior of operators with higher market power as compared to the behavior of more...

Public services provision depends on tax proceeds. The tax rate to finance public school is chosen through majority voting. Under the monotonicity condition implying that the preferred tax rate is decreasing in income, the literature predicts that the median voter is decisive and poor agents...

This paper analyses the evolution of competition in the Mexican banking system in the period 1993-2005, a period of deregulation, liberalization and consolidation of the sector. For this purpose we use two indicators of competition from the theory of industrial organization (the Lerner index and...

This paper analyses the determinants of interest margins of the banking firms.Our starting point is the methodology developed in the original study by Ho andSaunders (1981) and later extensions, but widened to take banks¿ operating costsexplicitly into account. In the developed model the...

We experimentally study the e¤ect of time on altruism. By postponing payments in a standard Dictator game, subjects allocate a future payment between themselves and others. Since both the payoffs of the Dictator and the Receiver are delayed until the same time, standard intertemporal utility...