In a recent paper, Alipranti et al. (2014, Price vs. quantity competition in a vertically related market, Economics Letters, 124: 122-126) show that in a vertically related market Cournot competition yields higher social welfare compared to Bertrand competition if the upstream firm subsidises...

Financial constraints are an important impediment to the growth of small businesses. We study theoretically and empirically how the financial constraints of agents affect their decisions to exert effort, and, hence the organizational decisions and growth of principals, in the context of...

We model non-binding retail-price recommendations (RPRs) as a communication device facilitating coordination in vertical supply relations. Assuming both repeated vertical trade and asymmetric information about production costs, we show that RPRs may be part of a relational contract,...

This paper analyzes the effects of specific and ad valorem taxation in an industry with downstream and upstream oligopoly. We find that in the short run, i.e. when the number of firms in both markets is exogenous, the results concerning tax incidence tend to be qualitatively similar to models...

We modify the UPP test of Farrell and Shapiro (2010) to take into account the possibility that a merger weakens (or eliminates) a vertical supply relationship. After deriving a general effect of the merger, we provide an example of simple estimation strategy when only prices, costs and market...

Recently collected data show that, within any manufacturing industry, vertically integrated firms tend to have larger, higher productivity plants, account for the bulk of sales, and also sell externally most of the inputs they produce. In a weak contracting environment characteristic of...

Reportedly, firms often find it impossible to finance large and long-term projects despite positive net present values. Should governments step in and can their assistance be effective? This paper studies the case of public export credit guarantees in Germany. Covering the default risk of...

In this paper, we investigate whether foreign currency accounts help overcome credit constraints in developing countries. We analyze a novel bank-level data set from Nepal, where a steady inflow of remittances has contributed to foreign currency deposits on commercial bank balance sheets. In...

This paper examines whether credit constraints affect Chinese firms' absorption of productivity spillovers from foreign firms. Using firm-level data for 2001-2005, we find evidence of positive spillovers originating from FDI from countries other than Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan for non-state...