Regulatory bank levies set incentives for banks to reduce leverage. At the same time, corporate income taxation makes funding through debt more attractive. In this paper, we explore how regulatory levies affect bank capital structure, depending on corporate income taxation. Based on bank balance...

Regulation needs effective supervision; but regulated entities may deviate with unobserved actions. For identification, we analyze banks, exploiting ECB’s asset-quality-review (AQR) and supervisory security and credit registers. After AQR announcement, reviewed banks reduce riskier securities...

The recent banking crisis has revealed the existence of strong resiliency factors in the retail banking business model. On average, retail banks suffered less than other financial institutions from unexpected market changes. This paper proposes a new methodology to measure retail banks’...

Imposing a minimum quality standard (MQS) is conventionally regarded as harmful if firms compete in quantities. This, however, ignores dynamic effects. We show that an MQS can hinder collusion, resulting in dynamic welfare gains that reduce and may even outweigh the usual static losses. Verdicts...

The amendment to the German Trade and Crafts Code in 2004 offers a natural experiment to asses the causal effects of this reform on the probabilities of being self-employed and transition into and out of self-employment, using cross-sections (2002-2006) of German microcensus data. This study...

This paper shows that the possibility of collusion between an agent and a supervisor imposes no restrictions on the set of implementable social choice functions (SCF) and associated payoff vectors. Any SCF and any payoff profile that are implementable if the supervisor's information was public...

We examine electricity market reform in Brazil: from the 1990s till 2004 the largely hydro-powered market cleared using a market mechanism, and in March 2004 reformed to a single buyer structure. We model monthly log price differences using a two-state Markov Switching model, allowing water...

This paper provides a novel rationale for the regulation of market size when heterogeneous firms compete. A regulator seeks to maximize total welfare by choosing the number of firms allowed to enter the market, e.g. by issuing a certain number of licenses. Opening up the market for more firms...

Regulation in the sanitation sector in Brazil is facing a great deal of debate regarding the government level in which conceding authority should reside and how private operators can fulfill social objectives. The main objective of this study is to show that these issues are not the crucial...

We analyze competition between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) where consumers demand heterogeneous content within two Quality-of-Service (QoS) regimes, Net Neutrality and Paid Prioritization, and show that paid prioritization increases the static efficiency compared to a neutral network. We...