This paper describes the privatization program in Italy during the 1990s and puts that policy in the context of macroeconomic adjustment, general market deregulation, and promotion of private investment in the provision of public infrastructure. The wave of state divestitures reached Italy later...

Recent advances in telecommunications, particularly using fibre technologies, permit many services based on data-processing to be performed anywhere in the world. They thus become tradable and subject to the laws of comparative advantage. A good example is data-processing within large...

We show that a minimum wage introduced in the presence of asymmetric information about worker productivities will lead to lower unemployment levels than predicted by the standard labour market model with heterogeneous labour and symmetric information. -- minimum wages ; unemployment ; asymmetric...

This paper presents and investigates a new data set of individual residential property transactions in England. The main novelty of the data is the record of all listing price changes and all offers made on a property, as well as all the visits by potential buyers for a subset of the properties....

After describing the essential features of the book market, a welfare analysis of the fixed book price agreement is given. Allowance is made for the opportunity cost of reading. Theoretically, the agreement pushes up book prices and depresses book sales. However, more titles will be published,...

We use retail transaction prices for a multinational retailer to examine the extent and permanence of violations of the law of one price (LOOP). For identical products, we find typical deviations of twenty to fifty percent, though there is muted evidence for convergence over time. Such...

A large body of literature finds that exporters do not pass nominal exchange rate movements fully through to destination market prices over short time horizons. This imperfect passthrough has been widely attributed to strategic pricing-to-market , whereby exporters deliberately accept changes in...

We explain the recent events in the German market for online access using a model of a regulated monopoly renting phone lines to retailers. Retailers offer either a linear or a flat tariff to consumers. Consumer heterogeneity leads to adverse selectiion. We show why market entry for flatrate...

Empirical evidence suggests that people dislike ads in media products like TV programs. In such situations standard economic theory prescribes that the advertising volume can be optimally reduced by levying a tax on ads. However, making use of recent advances in the theory of Industrial...

When the public provision of private goods is partial rather than universal, public supply may be supplemented by the entry of private firms in the market for the private good. The main purpose of this paper is to explore whether partial public provision helps or hinders aggregate access to the...