This paper investigates the link between product quality and price setting for central processing units (CPUs). Using thousands of price quotes from a popular price-comparison website, we find that market fundamentals, such as the number of sellers, median price, share of convenient prices and...

We use UK micro data to explore whether planning regulation reduced UK retailing productivity growth between 1997 and 2003. We document a shift to smaller shops, particularly within supermarket chains, following a regulatory change in 1996 which increased the costs of opening large stores. This...

We investigate empirically how sellers react to changes in the population of their consumers, identifying the effects of demand composition and demand size with limited information on costs. We show how pharmacists in Italy selectively increase the price of some products when they observe in...

In markets with imperfect information and heterogeneity, the information technology affects the rate at which agents meet, which in turn affects the distribution of production technologies across firms. We show that in models for such markets there are typically multiple equilibria because...

Are product market and entry regulation key sources of low employment growth in many European countries? We investigate this question in the context of the French retail trade industry. Since 1974, approval by regional zoning boards has been required for the creation or extension of any large...

It is now stylized that, while the impact of ownership on firm productivity is unclear, product market competition can be expected to have a positive impact on productivity, thereby making entry (or contestability of markets) desirable. Traditional research in the context of entry has explored...

Entrepreneurs who decide to enter an industry are faced with different levels of effective entry costs in different countries. These costs are heavily influenced by economic policy. What is not well understood is how international trade affects the government incentive to impact on entry costs,...

In contrast to the very large literature on skill-biased technical change among workers, there is hardly any work on the importance of skills for the entrepreneurs who employ those workers, and in particular on their evolution over time. This paper proposes a simple theory of skill-biased change...

In this paper we analyse the impact of employment protection legislation (EPL) on firms' entry and exit rates for a large sample of industries of thirteen countries selected from the most recent version of the OECD Structural and Business Statistics Database. Using a differences-in-differences...

There is evidence that pro-competitive reforms in an industry with large incumbents induce the latter to re-organise and reduce prices in an attempt to deter entry of new competitors. Using data for three broadly-defined network industries in 23 OECD countries and covering over 30 years, I show...