Recent theories suggest that consumers' search efforts are a function of prices and prices changes, respectively. This may help to explain the 'rockets and feathers' phenomenon often assigned to collusion – prices rise like rockets when costs increase and fall like feathers when costs...

In many markets prices react stronger to rising than to falling costs. This asymmetric cost pass-through is still not fully understood, but recent theories suggest that asymmetric adjustments of consumers' search efforts to rising and to falling prices may help to explain this. I use novel panel...

Recent research suggests that employment in young firms is more negatively impacted during economic downturns than employment in incumbent firms. This questions the effectiveness of policies that promote entrepreneurship to fight crises. We complement prior research that is mostly based on...

This paper empirically analyzes the existence of market power in the global iron ore market during the period 1993-2012 using an innovative Stochastic Frontier Analysis approach introduced by Kumbhakar et al. (2012). In contrast to traditional econometric procedures, this approach allows for the...

Unbundling of vertically integrated utilities has become an integral element in the regulation of network industries and has been implemented in many jurisdictions. The idea of separating the network, as the natural monopoly, from downstream retailing, which may be exposed to competition, is...

The literature on vertical integration in markets with regulated upstream prices suggests that the integrated upstream firm might engage in non-price discrimination. Several studies provide policy recommendations derived either from case study approaches or based on theoretical modeling which...

The paper provides empirical evidence for the causal impact of broadband Internet on the economic performance of German firms. Performance is measured in terms of labour productivity and realised process and product innovations. The analysis refers to the early phase of DSL expansion in Germany...

We explore the determinants and effects of trust relationships between upstream suppliers and downstream producers. Using unique survey data on individual supplier-buyer relationships in the German automotive industry, we show, by means of different measures of supplier-buyer trust, that higher...

The global economic crisis of 2008/2009 hit many firms hard. Faced with rapidly declining sales and highly uncertain economic prospects, firms had to cut costs and reconsider their business strategies. With respect to innovation, cost cutting often means to stop or underresource innovation...

This paper analyses the relevance of information and communication technologies (ICT) for firms' probability of global sourcing of inputs. Using firm-level data from Germany in 2009, which include mainly small and medium-sized firms, the empirical analysis differentiates between manufacturing...