The authors discuss entry and exit barriers and their interaction as basic building blocks of a decision making process for evaluating competitive advantage of a business. While the concept of entry barriers is much discussed in the context of high quality businesses, the authors posit that exit...

We study the grocery industry in Washington, DC, during the Great Depression using data from the 1929 Census of Distribution, a 1929-1930 survey by the Federal Trade Commission, and a 1935 business directory. We first document the differences between chains and independents in the Washington,...

In recent years, a large academic debate has tried to explain the rapid rise in CEO pay experienced over the past three decades. In this article, I review the main proposed theories, which span views of compensation as the result of a competitive labor market for executives to theories based on...

This paper tests whether product market competition affects vertical integration through the price channel. The identification strategy exploits data on ownership structure and deregulation of the US railroad sector as a source of exogenous variation in competition within the coal mining...

The rapidly advancing renewable energy market will result in new, complex legal questions, and the legal field must be willing to revive old antitrust doctrines if it wishes to continue to protect competition and consumers. The monopoly leveraging doctrine should be made useful again under...

Before 2004 South Africa was the dominant steam coal exporter to the European market. However a new market situation with rising global demand and prices makes room for a new entrant: Russia. The hypothesis investigated in this paper is that the three incumbent dominant firms located in South...

We use data on sequential water auctions to estimate demand when units are complements or substitutes. A sequential English auction model determines the estimating structural equations. When units are complements, one bidder wins all units by paying a high price for the first unit, thus...

This paper discusses how ICT and emerging electronic commerce in consumer products influence the relative efficiency in production of households and firms, resulting in changes in the division of tasks between these two types of agents. Increased information and competence of households, in...