We show that a minimum wage introduced in the presence of asymmetric information about worker productivities will lead to lower unemployment levels than predicted by the standard labour market model with heterogeneous labour and symmetric information. -- minimum wages ; unemployment ; asymmetric...

The performance of market based environmental regulation is affected by patents and vice versa. This interaction is studied for a new type of innovation where new technologies reduce emissions of a specific pollutant but at the same time cause a new type of damage. A robust finding is that the...

This paper analyzes the impact on mobile telephony diffusion patterns of the two predominant payment regimes, calling party pays (CPP) and receiving party pays (RPP), for mobile termination services. By applying instrumental variable techniques to panel data we account for a possible...

Consumers often purchase more than one differentiated product, assembling a portfolio, which might potentially affect substitution patterns of demand and, as a consequence, oligopolistic firms' pricing strategies. This paper studies such consumers' portfolio considerations by developing a...

This paper analyzes the dynamic incentives for technology adoption under a transferable permits system, which allows for strategic trading on the permit market. Initially, firms can both invest in low-emitting production technologies and trade permits. In the model, technology adoption and...

This thesis strives to offer new insights in two main areas. First, in the well-researched domain of payment cards chapters 2 and 3 investigate an aspect that has hitherto been scantly examined, namely, the fact that merchant usage fees differ substantially among merchant sectors. Additionally,...

Individual labour productivities are often unobservable for firms when hiring new workers. Job protection may prevent firms ex post from using information about labour productivities. We show that a binding minimum wage introduced in the presence of job protection will lead to lower unemployment...

In many countries hospital regulation undergoes fundamental change. In reaction to steadily increasing costs, authorities switch from cost of service regulation to prospective payment systems (PPS). While it seems clear that this new scheme sets strong cost saving incentives, this is not so...

Contractual and regulatory provisions for access affect incentives to invest in an upgraded network and, in particular, a next-generation access network. Investment decisions are made under uncertainty and have to be made over time. This papers provides a framework for taking uncertainty, risk...

Based on the seminal paper of Farrell (1957), researchers have developed several methods for measuring efficiency. Nowadays, the most prominent representatives are nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) and parametric stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), both introduced in the late 1970s....