Many voluntary agreements (VA's) fall under the European or Dutch cartel prohibition (Article 81 EC, Article 6 Mededingingswet). This paper starts with an abstract description of the relation between competition and environmental protection. Particular attention is paid to the role in this...

I find that current US's and EU's Antitrust laws -- in particular their "moderate"' leniency programmes that only reduce or at best cancel sanctions for price-fixing firms that self-report -- may make collusion enforceable even in one-shot competitive interactions, like Bertrand oligopolies and...

This paper provides a systematic study of the market for accountants in Italy during the period 1980-91. Firstly, it develops a comparison in the determinants of incomes of the two competing professions (Commercialisti and Ragionieri) focusing on entry as one of the main variables of interest to...

The paper deals with the regulation of professions in Italy. It is a very traditional system of regulation based on inputs control. This regulation is clearly excessive for most of the professions. In fact, market failures - both in terms of information asymmetries and externalities - do not...

The paper takes the viewpoint of the neoinstitutional theory of the firm to analyse Germany's voluntary Dual Management System for Packaging Waste Collection and Recycling (DSD); namely, its governance structure and its contractual relations with upstream and downstream firms. Two aspects...

Two of the main pillars of the EU waste collection policy are the Proximity Principle and Self-Sufficiency Principle. According to those, waste should be disposed as close as possible to where it has been produced. The effect of such provision is to increase the market power of local disposers,...

We study the regulation of a firm which supplies a regulated service while also operating in a competitive, unregulated sector. If the firm conducts its activities in the two markets jointly, it enjoys economies of scope whose size is the firm's private information, unknown either to the...

The paper studies how does the size of a cartel affect the possibility that its members can sustain a collusive agreement. I obtain that collusion is easier to sustain the larger the cartel is. Then, I explore the implications of this result on the incentives of firms to participate in a cartel....

The purpose of this paper is to represent in which way a stable and no negligible growth in demand can affect the level of sustainability of collusion. For the European Commission this assumption is seen as a factor that disincentives collusion and pushes to a competitive behavior. This fact...

Allowing firms to cooperate in their R&D is an industrial policy, which has received much attention in recent economics literature. Many of these contributions are based on the seminal analysis of d'Aspremont and Jacquemin (1988). We provide a general version of their model, which encompasses...