Economists recommend to partly redistribute gains to losers from a structural reform, which in many cases may be required for making the reform politically viable. However, taxation is distortionary. Then, it is unclear that compensatory transfers can support a Pareto-improving reform. This...

We study the labor market outcomes of a deregulation reform in Germany that removed licensing requirements to become self-employed in some occupations. Using longitudinal social security data, we implement a matched difference-in-differences design with entropy balancing to account for...

We develop a model of sluggish firm entry to explain short-run labor responses to technology shocks. We show that the labor response to technology and its persistence depend on the degree of returns to labor and the rate of firm entry. Existing empirical results support our theory based on...

This paper carries out an overview of the recent history of privatisation in Spain. At this point, the paper focuses on the analysis of the economic, financial and political objectives pursued by successive Spanish Administrations. It is argued that privatisation policy has been inconsistent...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of market-oriented institutional reforms in German network industries. A disaggregated approach is chosen, which differentiates between network services, infrastructure management and network infrastructure. The gradual opening of network...

In the European Union, energy markets are increasingly being liberalized. A case in point is the European natural gas industry. The general expectation is that more competition will lead to lower prices and higher volumes, and hence higher welfare. This paper indicates that this might not happen...

Services form an increasing proportion of the inputs used in manufacturing. We explore empirically whether competition in the service sector affects downstream manufacturing firms' efficiency, via the inputs used. Using French micro-data for services, we calculate proxies for competition in...

We study the impact of barriers to entry on workplace training. Our theoretical model indicates that there are two contrasting effects of deregulation on training. With a given number of firms, deregulation reduces the size of rents per unit of output that firms can reap by training their...

In the past two decades privatisation and liberalisation of network industries providing services of general economic interest (SGEI), have been particularly significant in the European Union. Wide variations around a common policy trend can, however, be observed across countries and sectors. We...

The research agenda of Europeanization is currently highly focused on issued related to what accounts for the 'horizontal' interaction between domestic actors and how these actors make use of stimuli originating from the EU. This paper aims to contribute to this line of inquiry through the case...