Short-term contracts and exogenous productivity growth are introduced in asimple wage bargaining model. The equilibrium utilities corresponding tomilitant union behaviour are independent of the contract length. The wagedynamics are linear if strike is credible (low wage shares) and...

Strikes as a consequence of labour conflicts occur about 28 times as much in France as in the Netherlands. This paper examines the institutional differences underlying these differences in strike activity. Our empirical analysis shows that strike activity is high in France if workers were...

One of the main unanswered questions in the field of urban economics is to which extent subsidies to public transit are justified. We examine one of the main benefits of public transit, a reduction in car congestion externalities, the so-called congestion relief benefit, using quasi-natural...

This paper develops a model of the birth and death of cartels in the presence of enforcement activities by a Competition Authority (CA). We distinguish three sets of interventions: (a) detecting, prosecuting and penalizing cartels; (b) actions that aim to stop cartel activity in the short-term,...

In Katsoulacos et al. (2015) we examined the welfare properties of a number of monetary penalty regimes for tackling cartels, including revenue-based penalties, the most widely used regime. We showed that for a typical industry overcharge-based penalties welfare-dominate the others. However...

We study antitrust enforcement that channels price-fixing incentives through setting fines and allocating resources to detection activities. Antitrust fines obey four legal principles: punishments should fit the crime, proportionality, bankruptcy considerations, and minimum fines. Bankruptcy...

We extend the models in ("Competition in two-sided markets" of Armstrong (2006, Rand Journal of Economics) by adding within-group externalities. In the monopoly and duopoly cases, positive within-group externalities reduce the price of the own group. Negative externalities have an opposite price...