This paper argues that the accession to the European Union improves the quality of competition policy via the implementation of pro-competitive policies, especially antitrust and competition policies, embedded in the Community Acquis. We assess this conjecture empirically for the (former)...

We investigate the drivers of firm level productivity in catching-up economies by jointly estimating its relationship to innovation and competition using data from the EBRD-WB Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The findings confirm...

This note revisits the conjecture that the use of broadband internet lowers transaction costs and thereby inflation. Using a macroeconomic panel of OECD countries, it roughly confirms previous findings reported by Yi and Choi (2005) by addressing conceptual and econometric issues.

Aiming at both low prices and innovation, policy makers and economists have long argued about the optimal intensity of competition. While the current discussion in telecommunication regulation points out that competition can be detrimental to innovation due to the low appropriability of rents...

The report underpins the discussion of applications of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in the welfare sector. Greater use of ICTs is embedded in the Europa 2020 growth strategy which sees the availability of broadband access as a prerequisite for the use of such services....

In this paper we argue that changes in the EU membership status of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe led to less concentrated markets. This is due to the implementation of competition policy and other pro-competitive policies embedded in the Community Acquis, the body of European Union...

We revisit the impact of rising imports from China on within firm labour productivity growth in the EU. The period analysed is 2003 through 2016 and thus covers the recent increase of technology-intensive imports from China. We find that higher fractions of Chinese imports in aggregate imports...

Austria is a small open economy that in the last decades underwent two different waves of increasing trade integration: one with Eastern Europe and one with China. This paper studies the effects of increases in trade with China and Eastern Europe on labour market dynamics in Austrian NUTS-4...

We study the strategic positioning of Austrian manufacturing firms that face competition from emerging markets as opposed to firms that do not. Using a unique sample of large Austrian manufacturing, we find that emerging market competitors are not always a force majeure, but the result of the...

We use the supply tables that underlie WIOT data to explore the provision of services by manufacturing sectors. The value-added shares generated by services differ substantially across countries and sectors, while they remain largely stable over time. A Bayesian classification assigns broadly...