The increasing concentration of retailing in many countries (particularly in Europe) is a cause for concern for competition authorities. In a formal model, we argue that retailer market power influences upstream firms' incentives to introduce new products. On the basis of a survey of German food...

We investigate the impact of decentralised decision-making on product quality. Comparing a cooperative and an investor-owned firm suggests that members of the cooperative have an incentive to produce too much and to free-ride on quality. Whether or not cooperatives deliver higher quality...

The paper applies a semi-parametric propensity score matching approach to evaluate the effects of agri-environment (AE) programmes on input use and farm output of individual farms in Germany. The analysis reveals a positive and significant treatment effect of AE programmes on the area under...