Before 2004 South Africa was the dominant steam coal exporter to the European market. However a new market situation with rising global demand and prices makes room for a new entrant: Russia. The hypothesis investigated in this paper is that the three incumbent dominant firms located in South...

With its resource availability and the prospect of climate friendly technology, coal continues to play an important role in the global energy sector. We develop a complementarity model of the international market for steam coal. We want to analyze the level of competition in this market which is...

Coal continues to be an important fuel in many countries' energy mix and, despite the climate change concerns, it is likely to maintain this position for the next decades. In this paper a numerical model is developed to investigate the evolution of the international market for steam coal, the...

The telecommunications in the 1990s witnessed an enormous worldwide round of Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A). This paper examines the innovation determinants of M&A activity and the consequences of M&A transactions on the technological potential and the innovation performance. We examine the...

In a framework with an upstream monopoly and a downstream duopoly, we analyze the impact of convex costs on the downstream level. In constrast to the case of constant marginal costs, vertical integration does not imply complete market foreclosure. While the nonintegrated downstream ¯rm receives...

In this paper, we compare the distribution of price changes between collusive and noncollusive periods for ten major cartels. The first moments focus on previous research. We extend the discussion to the third (skewness) and fourth (kurtosis) moments. However, none of the above descriptive...

Using micro-level panel data of about 35,000 firms from the German Cost Structure Census, we analyze the differences of technical efficiency across industries. Technical efficiency is estimated by firms' fixed effects. One striking result is that the distribution of technical efficiency across...

In this paper we investigate whether small-scale businesses face financial constraints that affect their survival. We develop a model of moral hazard in which financial constraints arise endogenously. The model predicts that higher private assets relax financial constraints and have a positive...

This paper follows two objectives: (i) It demonstrates the merits of the survey based approach to B2C eCommerce characteristics and company strategy, and (ii) it presents empirical evidence of the crucial importance of size and marketing investment in B2C eCommerce markets. It presents...

This paper investigates the factors that explain the level and dynamics of manufacturing firm productive efficiency. In our empirical analysis, we use a unique sample of about 39,000 firms in 256 industries from the German Cost Structure Census over the years 1992-2005. We estimate the...