Empirical work shows that competition is important for promoting economic growth. However, in Japan the promotion of competition has long been compromised by ministerial guidance and exemptions from the competition law. Thus, the level and growth of productivity have been low in many...

The strength of product market competition plays an important role in ensuring dynamic economic growth. This paper examines product market competition and its link with economic performance in Switzerland whose growth has been weaker than in most OECD countries since 1980. It shows that...

Hybrid governance structures between markets and hierarchies in many industries, e.g., in energy and telecommunications, challenge antitrust and regulation policy. The paper focusses on the theoretical and methodological basis provided by the New Institutional Economics (NIE) for analyzing the...

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) released its Digital Platform Services Inquiry, Interim Report No. 5 (Regulatory Reform) in September 2022. In December 2022, the Australian Treasury requested comments on the report. The ACCC Report recommends, inter alia, several...

This paper deals with the question what the relationship is between consumer activity and non-competitive market outcomes in deregulated markets. These market failures could be the result of bad regulation, bad competition law enforcement or insufficient consumer activity. The different causes...

In the beginning of fixed network liberalisation in Europe in the late 1990s, the main concern of regulators was to lower calls prices. This was done by introducing wholesale regulation and promoting service based competition. Some years later, the concern of some regulators turned from too high...

This paper looks at the effects of different forms of wholesale and retail regulation on retail competition in fixed network telephony markets. We explicitly model two asymmetries between the incumbent operator and the entrant: (i) While the incumbent has zero marginal costs, the entrant has the...

The financial organisations engaged in the electricity and natural gas markets were forced to change, due to the deregulation process. The presence of new players in the markets and changes in demand obliged the existing companies to react. This reaction was not limited to an aggressive...

Ten years have passed since the European Commission obliged its member states to open their national handling markets to competition. This paper analyzes whether the policy has allowed airlines to design efficient contractual and organizational solutions with their ramp handling suppliers....