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...

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’...

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....

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...

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...

Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

We study optimal risk adjustment in imperfectly competitive health insurance markets when high-risk consumers are less likely to switch insurer than low-risk consumers. First, we find that insurers still have an incentive to select even if risk adjustment perfectly corrects for cost differences...