This article examines the collusive potential of first refusal contracts, which are contracts that grant one party, the buyer, a right of first refusal on the output of another party, the seller. When two parties enter into this type of contract, the seller is obligated to offer any output she...

Agricultural cooperatives have often been promoted as a way to increase their market power and to obtain stability of profit against uncertainty. This paper estimates the firm-level markups and markup volatility to identify the countervailing market power of cooperatives in the Italian fruits...

We examine whether the European settlement institutions are technically efficient. This is done by means of estimating a translog cost function, and investigating whether scale economies are fully exploited. Since the sample is quite heterogeneous, fixed effects regression is introduced. From...

Many contributions to the literature on competition in banking use the Panzar and Rosse test (1987). This test encompasses a variety of market outcomes assuming firms maximize profits. However, when applied to the banking industry, this assumption may not be always valid as banks sometimes may...

This paper uses representative firm level panel data of 1,701 Bulgarian and 2,047 Romanian manufacturing firms to estimate market power (i.e. price-cost margins) and to analyze how these are affected by privatization and increased competitive pressure. In contrast to earlier work that analyzes...

In this paper, we analyze the effects of trade, concentration and ownership on the pricing behavior of firms in two transition countries, Bulgaria and Romania. We use an extensive dataset of more than 3000 firms and sector level infirmation to estimate the effects of these three factors on the...

We introduce an analytical framework close to the canonical model of platfirm competition investigated by Rochet and Tirole (2006) to study pricing decisions in two-sided markets when two or more platfirms are needed simultaneously for the successful completion of a transaction. The model...

A model of loan rate competition with liquidity provision by banks is used to study bank mergers. Both loan rate competition and liquidity needs are seen to be "localised" phenomena. This allows for tracing down the effects of particular types of bank mergers. As such, we contrast the effects of...

This paper analyzes the relationship between state aid and ?rm performance in terms of productivity growth. To this end, we use all European state aid cases that were granted (either to an individual ?rm or a group of ?rms under the form of a scheme) in manufacturing between 2003 and 2011. Our...