The European labour markets are characterized by the existence of trade unions with extensive coverage whereas wage contracts are typically determined through decentralized firm-union bargaining. On the other hand, as it particularly refers to migrant and ethnic minority groups, equally-skilled...

This paper studies firms owners' incentives to engage in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities in an oligopolistic market, in a strategic delegation and vertical product differentiation context. Firms' owners have the opportunity to hire "socially responsible" managers and delegate to...

In this paper, we examine how the structure of an imperfectly competitive input market affects final-good producers’ incentives to form a Research Joint Venture (RJV), in a differentiated duopoly where R&D investments exhibit spillovers. Although a RJV is always profitable, downstream firms’...

We examine how different unionisation structures and the spillovers of R&D activities affect R&D investments and firms’ incentives to form a Research Joint Venture. We find that whenever firms invest non-cooperatively, an industry union increases R&D investments, if industry specific...

The present note shows that "innocuous" Minimum Quality Standards, namely below the lowest quality in a market, may have effects on equilibrium outcomes. Such a MQS reduces the incentive to invest in R&D by the quality-leading firm.

This paper investigates the effect of the government’s ability to commit, or not, to a specific level of environmental policy instrument, or environmental innovation and welfare in imperfectly competitive markets. We that under monopoly if the government is unable to commit, and follows thus a...

The present paper explores the scope of strategic delegation, to the firms' R&D investments and market competition in a Cournot Oligopoly. The firms' owners' have two alternative strategies: either the Full Delegation (FD) one, in which firms' owners delegate both short-run and long-run...

This paper extends the concept of the exercise boundary as an analytical tool in determining when an optimizing agent might undertake an irreversible action under uncertainty. to situations where the objective function of optimizing agents depends on decisions taken by other agents. By using the...

This paper studies the endogenous structure of incentive contracts that firms' owners offer to their managers, when these contracts are linear combinations either of own profits and own revenues, or of own profits and competitor's profits or, finally, of own profits and own market share. In...