The purpose of the paper is to provide a simple model explaining buyer-supplier relationships and show what factors determine the number of trading partners. We show that when the supplier is able to determine the number of trading partners, the optimal number is small if the supplier's...

This paper discusses the impact of a firm's technology portfolio on its market value. Two concepts are used to characterize a firm's portfolio: the number of technological fields and the degree of relatedness within the portfolio characterized by the amount of joint occurrences of patents in...

This paper sets up a general oligopolistic equilibrium model with multi-product firms and union wage setting in a subset of industries. By claiming a wage premium, labor unions enforce a decline in firm scale and scope and thus dampen industrial output, with negative feedback effects on the...

The financial services industry is „special“ in a variety of ways, including the fiduciary nature of the business, its role at the center of the payments and capital allocation process with all its static and dynamic implications for economic performance, and the systemic nature of problems...

This paper investigates the determinants of success in the development of new drugs. In specific, it explores the factors of success in drug development programs at different stages of innovation process. We use economies of scale, scope, R&D competition and technological spillovers as...

Economies of scale and scope are typically modelled and estimated using cost functions that are common to all firms in an industry irrespective of whether they specialize in a single output or produce multiple outputs. We suggest an alternative flexible technology model that does not make this...

The policy debate on whether to strengthen or to remove the legal barriers between banking and commerce has paid little attention to what the practical effects of removing the barriers would be. To help answer this question, this article, the first part of a two-part study, provides an overview...

Since the late 1990s, the European higher education system has had to face deep structural changes. With the public authorities seeking to create an environment of quasi-markets in the higher education sector, the increased competition induced by recent reforms has pushed all publicly financed...

Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden wesentlichen Merkmale eines Too Big To Fail (TBTF) Regimes diskutiert. Hierunter wird ein politisches Umfeld verstanden, in dem grosse, systemrelevante Finanzinstitute durch staatliche Massnahmen vor der Insolvenz gerettet werden. Das TBTF Regime rechtfertigt sich...

Although most production activities involve multiple outputs, econometric models of production or cost functions normally involve only one single homogeneous output. The aim of this paper is to test the hypothesis that a multiproduct specification is superior to a model with a single homogenous...