This paper explores the ability of European refineries to pass-through costs associated with the introduction of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). We estimated a sequence of vector error correction models (VECM) within a multi-national setting which covers 14 EU member states. Using...

Price adjustments, particularly the cost pass-through relationships, are at the core of the analysis on how asymmetric climate change policy initiates two channels of carbon leakage: (decreasing) market shares and profit margins. Using advanced time-series techniques, this paper explores the...

We investigate how consumer information affects price adjustment in the Austrian retail gasoline market. Our measure of consumer information is obtained from detailed census data on commuting behavior, as commuters can freely sample prices on their commuting route and are thus better informed...

Agricultural cooperatives have often been promoted as a way to increase their market power and to obtain stability of profit against uncertainty. This paper estimates the firm-level markups and markup volatility to identify the countervailing market power of cooperatives in the Italian fruits...

Kern dieses Working Papers ist die Prüfung eines staatlichen Kaufverbots von Agrarerzeugnissen und Lebensmitteln unterhalb der Herstellungskosten. In Deutschland gibt es seit ein paar Jahren eine erhebliche politische Diskussion hierzu, die sich schließlich im Koalitionsvertrag der...

The use of traditional industry-level profitability indicators for assessing the state of competition is problematic for two reasons. First, short-term variation reflects business cycles more than it does the impact of competition policy. Second, rough industry-level indicators hide different...

We analyze the strategic behavior of firms when demand is determined by a rule of thumb behavior of consumers. We assume consumer dynamics where individual consumers follow simple behavioral decision rules governed by imitation and habit as suggested in consumer research. On this basis, we...

How do firms adjust prices in the marketplace? Do they tend to adjust prices infrequently in response to changes in market conditions? If so, why? These remain key questions in macroeconomics, particularly for central banks that work to keep inflation low and stable. The authors use the Bank of...

We present evidence from 260,000 online auctions of second-hand cars to identify the impact of public reserve prices on auction outcomes. To establish causality, we exploit multiple discontinuities in the relationship between reserve prices and vehicle characteristics to present RD estimates of...

This paper analyzes price competition in an infinitely repeated duopoly game. In each period, consumers remember the existence and location of their previous supplier. New information is gathered via search or word-of-mouth communication. Market outcomes are history-dependent, and the Markov...