Using a stochastic frontier model and a comprehensive dataset, we study factors that affect corporate efficiency in Europe. We find that (i) larger firms are less efficient than smaller firms, (ii) greater leverage contributes to corporate efficiency, and (iii) high competition is less...

Miscoordination of buyers might prevent entry in an industry with an incumbent and a more efficient potential entrant. Buyers' power therefore favours entry by eliminating coordination problems. We also identify a mechanism which facilitates entry: if the potential entrant could credibly offer...

This paper surveys recent work on competition in markets in which consumers face costs to switching between competing firms' products, even when all firms' products are functionally identical. I address issues in macroeconomics, international trade and industrial organization: In a market with...

A particular tariff option is said to be foggy when another option or a combination of other tariff options offered by the same firm is always less expensive regardless of the usage profile of any customer. Alternatively, tariff fogginess may refer to the whole set of tariff options and it is...

I study how firms actually compete in nonlinear tariffs by analyzing whether the incumbent and entrant's decisions to offer a given number of tariff options are interrelated. The goal is to shed some light on those dynamic and strategic aspects of tariff menus that are currently ignored by...

This paper examines how corporate governance and executive compensation affect bank capitalization strategies for an international sample of banks over the 2003-2011 period. ‘Good’ corporate governance, which favors shareholder interests, is found to give rise to lower bank capitalization....

This paper finds that shareholder-friendly corporate governance is positively associated with bank insolvency risk, as proxied by the Z-score and the Merton’s distance to default measure, for an international sample of banks over the 2004-2008 period. Banks are special in that ‘good’...

Market definitions are an abstraction: they are useful only to the extent that they help us to organize the way we think about certain types of economic activity. This paper critically examines three different methods of identifying market boundaries, stressing the link between substantive...

In this paper we present estimates of inventory models based on firm level panel data and investigate whether an over-simplified specification of the production technology may account for the failure to find technological incentives to smooth production in the context of the standard...

The paper presents a model of 'high-low search' under uncertainty, in which a 'conservative' firm 'searches' for an unknown product demand by making a sequence of production decisions. After each production decision and the concomitant sales, the firm infers whether its supply is 'too high' or...