Social security contributions in most countries are split between employers and employees. According to standard incidence analysis, social security contributions affect employment negatively, but it is irrelevant how they are divided between employers and employees. This paper considers the...

In a three-stage duopoly game with product design at stage 1, advertising & marketing at stage 2, and price competition at stage 3, advertising & marketing enable customers to distinguish the goods from each other thus relaxing price competition. The subgame perfect equilibria of the three stage...

This paper presents evidence on the impact of bank-specific, regulatory, institutional, macro and financial development variables on competition in banking, using information at both national and bank level. With this aim, Lerner indices of market power are estimated using a sample of 10,479...

In this paper we analyze incentives to invest in capacity prior to asequence of Cournot spot markets with varying demand. We compareequilibrium investment in the absence and in presence of the possibility to tradeon forward markets. We find that the possibility to trade forwards...

This paper deals with price competition among multiproduct firms. We consider a model with n firms and one representative buyer. Each firm produces a set of products that can be different or identical to the other firms' products. The buyer is characterized by her willingness to pay -in monetary...

I construct a model in which an oligopoly first invests in persuasive advertising in order to induce brand loyalty to consumers who would otherwise buy the cheapest alternative on the market, and then competes in prices. Despite ex-ante symmetry, at equilibrium, there is one firm which chooses a...

In models of product differentiation and location models it is implicitly assumed that consumers can afford to buy the differentiated goods in the market. I show that with income heterogeneity there are severe existence problems of a price equilibrium in models of horizontal product...

We present a model in which the consumers' capacity to access a service provided on a network depends negatively on the price charged by the network owner per capacity unit. Several scenarios concerning the structure of the downstream service provision market are studied. First, a monopolist...

Based on the assumption that location is especially relevant in the lodging industry, we exploit a dataset of Spanish hotels to examine the relationship between spatial competition and retail price level and dispersion. Our results support the hypothesis that a greater density of competitors...

In this paper, we endogenize the decision of a research laboratory that owns a patented process innovation on whether to remain independent as an external patentee or to merge with a manufacturing firm, becoming an internal to the industry patentee. We show that a merger is profitable only for...