It is commonly argued that labor market institutions such as employment protection worsen an economy's performance and particularly so, if product markets become more competitive. Empirical evidence, however, has difficulties to detect a robust negative correlation between employment protection...

We examine the economic analysis of the relationship between innovation and product market competition. First, we give a brief tour of the intellectual history of the area. Second, we examine how the Aghion-Howitt framework has influenced the development of the literature theoretically and...

The role of patents is threefold: first, they are important to state the property rights of an invention; second, they are necessary to secure financing for starting a new venture; third, they are fundamental to recoup R&D investments. The main difficulty in preventing unauthorized use of an...

The digital revolution has reinvigorated the discussion about the problem how to consider innovation in the application of competition law. This raises difficult questions about the relationship between competition and innovation as well as what kind of assessment concepts competition...

This paper introduces a second, vertically related industry into the usual one-industry oligopoly framework of cooperative R&D investment between firms operating on the same product market. R&D efforts are affected by intra- and inter-industry R&D spillovers. Horizontal and vertical R&D...

The theoretical discussion concerning the question whether the incumbent or the (potential) entrant invests more into R&D has attracted considerable interest. This paper reports the results of an empirical study on this question using data of about 3500 German firms over the years 1992 to 1995....

Ein Jahr nach Inkrafttreten der deutschen Energierechtsnovelle sind die Konturen der zukünftigen Strommarktregulierung noch zu weiten Teilen ungeklärt. Vor diesem aktuellen wirtschaftspolitischem Hintergrund wird in diesem Papier die Frage nach einer sachgerechten Ausrichtung der...

Recent years have witnessed an enormous amount of reorganization of the corporate sector in the US and in Europe. This paper examines the role of market competition for this trend in corporate reorganization. We find that at intermediate levels of competition the CEO of the corporation decides...