In this paper we show that when a monopolist incurs certain costs for servicing or maintaining its customer-base, price markups may decrease with high demand mdash; i.e. markups are countercylical. Indeed, for a given market share when demand booms each customer on average will purchase more...

Despite substantial increases in longevity, the age of retirement in the industrialized countries has steadily fallen throughout most of the 20th century. In France, for instance, the employment-population ratio of 55-64 year-old males fell from 74% in 1970 to 38.5% in 2000. In most other OECD...

This paper examines the empirical link between severance pay and corporate finance. Severance pay is an economic debt of the employer and hence should be taken into account by the market in its assessments of risk. Using a hand collected dataset of accounting data from Italy and Austria we find...