Price adjustments, particularly the cost pass-through relationships, are at the core of the analysis on how asymmetric climate change policy initiates two channels of carbon leakage: (decreasing) market shares and profit margins. Using advanced time-series techniques, this paper explores the...

This paper explores the ability of European refineries to pass-through costs associated with the introduction of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). We estimated a sequence of vector error correction models (VECM) within a multi-national setting which covers 14 EU member states. Using...

This paper analyses the effects of minimum wages on competition in the German roofing sector. The case is particularly interesting since this sector is faced with a uniform minimum wage despite significant regional disparities in productivity and wages. As a control industry we take the plumbing...

Buyer power is widely considered to decrease innovation incentives of suppliers. However, there is little empirical evidence for this statement. Our paper analyses how buyer power influences innovation incentives of upstream firms while taking into account the type of competition in the...

We investigate the effect of market structure on market performance in the market for consumer electronics. We exploit product life cycle information to build an instrumental variable for the number of firms in a market, a variable which hitherto had to be treated as exogenous in comparable...

We study competition in the German interurban bus industry two years after its liberalization in January 2013. In addition to a brief characterization of the liberalization process and several general market developments, we provide a detailed analysis of selected market characteristics such as...

We provide an empirical assessment of the German interurban bus industry two years after its deregulation in January 2013. In addition to a general description of key developments of the industry, we use a unique route-level price data set to study both competitive interaction in general and the...

This paper investigates how competition and firm size affect the relationship between market uncertainty and Ramp;D investment. We use an intuitively appealing measure of firm-specific uncertainty along with panel data to show that firms invest less in current Ramp;D as uncertainty about market...

In many markets prices react stronger to rising than to falling costs. This asymmetric cost pass-through is still not fully understood, but recent theories suggest that asymmetric adjustments of consumers' search efforts to rising and to falling prices may help to explain this. I use novel panel...

We study how consumer search affects pricing in markets with incumbents and entrants using panel data on German electricity retail markets. Consumers observe the baseline price of the incumbent and decide whether or not to search. Incumbent providers can price discriminate between searching and...