There has been increasing interest in understanding how firms undertake non-price adjustment activities, especially in situations where prices may be rigid despite changes in market conditions. Using scanner price data for over 4,500 different food products from a large US supermarket chain, we...

We analyze a symmetric n-firm Cournot oligopoly with a heterogeneous population of optimizers and imitators. Imitators mimic the output decision of the most successful firms of the previous round a la Vega-Redondo (1997). Optimizers play a myopic best response to the opponents' previous output....

In the economic literature on market competition, firms are often modelled as individual decision makers and the internal organization of the firm is neglected (unitary player assumption). However, as the literature on strategic delegation suggests, one can not generally expect that the behavior...

Two major methods of explaining economic institutions, namely by strategic choices or through (indirect) evolution, are compared for the case of a homogenous quadratic duopoly market. Sellers either can provide incentives for agents to care for sales, or evolve as sellers who care for sales in...

In this paper we examine the location determinants of the inflow of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)into Poland, at a regional level. Using survey data from an online questionnaire in February 2005and a multinomial logit model incorporating the investor’s specific characteristics, we show...

The paper studies the demand for foreign university graduates at the firm level. Using a unique dataset on recruitment policies of firms in four European countries, the determinants of demand for internationally mobile highly skilled employees are established. I investigate the number, origin,...

Using a general two-stage framework, this paper gives sufficient conditions for increasing competition to have negative or positive effects on R&D-investment, respectively. Both possibilities arise in plausible situations, even if one uses relatively narrow definitions of increasing competition....

We examine the interplay of endogenous vertical integration and costreducing downstream investment in successive oligopoly. We start from a linear Cournot model to motivate our more general reducedform framework. For this general framework, we establish the following main results: First,...

This paper examines the determinants of mergers and bankruptcies, using firm level data from the Swiss Business Census and the Dun & Bradstreet exit database for Switzerland (1995-2000). Employing duration analysis, we find considerable differences in the determinants of mergers and...

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die Determinanten der Entscheidung, einen Sohn oder eine Tochter zum familieninternen Nachfolger zu bestimmen. Ein besonderes Augenmerk liegt dabei auf dem Geschlecht des Übergebers. Nationale wie internationale Forschungsarbeiten deuten darauf hin, dass...