The study analyzes the impact of European antitrust enforcement on industry performance measured as competition intensity (Price Cost Margin) and productivity (labor productivity and distance to the frontier). For a panel of OECD countries on the industry level since 1988, we estimate the impact...

This article considers legal uncertainty in competition law. Contrary to perceived wisdom, I show that the uncertainty itself might have positive welfare effects, if it is sufficiently small. Legal uncertainty functions as a screening device provided that the threshold of legality is uncertain....

The aim of this paper is to give deeper insights into the impact of regulatory reforms and privatization on R&D spending of electricity utilities. Building on a panel data set including the biggest European utilities from eight EU-countries over a period from 1985 until 2010, we find a strong...

Assuming deterministic demand Liski and Montero (2006) show that forward trading is able to facilitate collusion. We present a more concise model incorporating the main reason for forward trading: Uncertainty. In general, fl uctuations make collusion harder to sustain (Rotemberg and Saloner,...

We investigate how remedies in merger control affect information acquisition by an antitrust agency. We identify conditions under which an ''extreme options'' regime which does not allow for remedies improves information acquisition by the agency which increases consumer surplus. The legislator...

We estimate the spillovers on firm profitability and market shares in oligopolistic markets through the transition from an n to an n-1 player oligopoly after a merger in the industry. Competitors are identified via the European Commission s market investigations and our methodology allows us to...

This article analyzes the effects of intellectual property rights protection on innovation in a quality-ladder model in which part of the consumers value being the exclusive consumers of the newest generation of a good. In the case of a monopoly innovator, we show that reducing IP protection can...

Given various recent antitrust investigations on the retail sector, we deal with uncovering demand systems substitution patterns for a particular market (diapers) to investigate the inter-format competition (supermarkets vs. discounters vs. drugstores). Using the uncovered demand system we...

In general, banks play a growth-enhancing role for the real economy. However, distorted incentives of banks, depositors, and regulators around bank insolvency may corrupt banks' credit allocation and monitoring decisions, leading to suboptimal real economic outcomes. A rules-based prompt...

I explore the effects of on-net / off-net differentiation on network sizes in mobile telecommunications when both rational and non-rational consumers coexist in the market. In particular, three different types of consumers are modeled: (1) fully informed rational (FIR) consumers who are...