The paper aims at assessing discrete complementarities in innovation policies in the context of the Brazilian industry in 2003. The paper considers the approach advanced by Mohnen and and Röller [European Economic Review, 2005] that focuses on supermodularity and submodularity tests for...

Prices for cryptocurrencies have undergone multiple boom-bust cycles, together with ongoing entry by retail investors. To investigate the drivers of crypto adoption, we assemble a novel database (made available with this paper) on retail use of crypto exchange apps at daily frequency for 95...

This paper elaborates on the recent race to sequence the human genome. Starting from the debate on public vs. private research arising from the genome case, the paper shows that in some fundamental research areas, where knowledge externalities play an important role, market and non-market...

The U.S. and EU Merger Guidelines strongly emphasize the relevance of the "ease of entry" argument in merger evaluations. Up to now, very little is known empirically about how mergers affect entry and exit, and the resulting number of firms in the markets. We empirically test this aspect of...

Aspirations towards technological sovereignty increasingly pervade the political debate. Yet, an ambiguous definition leaves the exact goal of those aspirations and the policies to fulfill them unclear. This leaves room for partly particularly negative interpretations, such as equating the...

Mergers realize heterogeneous competitive effects on profits, production, and prices. To date, it is unclear whether differential merger outcomes are caused mostly by firms' technology or product market attributes. Furthermore, empirical merger studies conventionally assume that, conditional on...

Pharmaceutical firms spend increasing amounts in mergers and acquisitions (M&As), which raises the question of whether sufficient investment is left after mergers to further develop firms' internal drug development capability. We evaluate the effects of M&As on firms' post-merger R&D...

This paper finds that coherent regulatory policies can boost investment in network industries of OECD economies. Rate-of-return regulation is generally thought to result in overinvestment, while incentive regulation is believed to entail underinvestment. Yet, previous empirical work has...

This paper investigates to what extent unregulated local monopolies attempt not to evoke the introduction of a formal price regulation by conforming to customers' and authorities' expectations. It is argued that utilities can meet expectations by setting prices that imitate neighbours' prices....

The marginal cost of electricity fluctuates hour-by-hour, yet retail customers typically face flat prices. Using data from all seven US wholesale markets and a new method to evaluate alternative rates set in advance that accounts for equilibrium price effects, we estimate efficiency gains...