The 44 Liquormart decision, eliminating Rhode Island's ban on liquor price advertising, made Rhode Island the subject of a natural experiment for measuring the effect of advertising on prices. Using Massachusetts prices as controls, we find that advertising stores substantially cut only prices...

The main purpose of this paper is to provide a critical overview of the recent empirical contributions that use cross country data to study the effect of product market regulation and reform on a country’s macroeconomic performance. After a brief review of the theoretical literature and of...

Under price-cap regulation, economic gains can be unlocked by permitting "trades" which do not make consumers worse off. We propose a simple method for "refereeing" such trades, based on compensating variation and utilizing Fisher's ideal price index. It is theoretically preferred to the...

It has been argued that it is inefficient to restrict the ability of the rich to buy better legal defense than the poor because such restrictions lead to overdeterrence of the wealthy, who have a higher opportunity cost of imprisonment. We show that the ability of the rich to buy a lower...

Important conclusions of the paper are that contrary to theoretical expectation, regulation on rate of return to capital (RORC) did not result in a greater than optimal degree of capital intensity of production of firms. Firms also had an incentive in terms of an increase in profit margin (PTM)...

In this study we analyze the evolution of operating cost efficiency for the English and Welsh water industry over the period 1995-2001 by estimating an heteroskedastic stochastic variable cost frontier. Aim of the paper is to analyze cost efficiency over a period characterized by significant...

We explore the relation between the establishment of a regulatory agency and the performance of the electricity sector. We exploit a dataset comprising firmlevel information on a representative sample of 220 electric utilities from 51 development countries for the period 1985 to 2005. Our...

Previous studies of the announcement effects of relaxing administrative and legislative restraints show that signal events leading up to the enactment of the Financial Services Modernization Act (FSMA) increased the prices of several classes of financial-institution stocks. An unsettled question...