We analyze collusion under demand uncertainty by cartels such as OPEC that care about the utility derived from profits by citizens. When citizens are sufficiently risk averse and fixed operating costs are non-trivial, it becomes difficult for cartels to collusively restrict output both when...

This study examines how the rules of origin (RoO) of a free trade agreement (FTA) affect firms' pricing strategies. A value-added criterion (VAC) of the RoO requires firms to add more than a certain level of values within an FTA when firms use inputs originating from outside the FTA. The VAC may...

The Soviet Union dissolved on December 26, 1991. This accelerated a trend toward both the development of market economies and competition law to protect those economies. No one could have predicted that within twenty years most of the world’s trading economies would have adopted recognizable...

International cartelists today face antitrust investigations and possible fines in a score of national and supranational jurisdictions. This paper aims at providing quantitative information about the size and impacts of international cartel activity in Asia and uses a sample of modern private...

American agricultural law's environmental record is a legacy of legislative failure. Most of the blame can and should be attributed to the failure of the law to separate ecological objectives from competing and ultimately contradictory economic objectives. Two strains of agroecological fallacies...

Since the early 1990s, numerous countries have adopted or strengthened competition legislation. In this paper we investigate the impact of competition law on markups of industries over time across a large number of countries. We find measures of external and internal competition (imports and the...

The seaborne steam coal market changed in recent years. Trade volumes grew dynamically, important players emerged and since 2007 prices increased significantly and remained relatively high since then. In this paper we analyse market equilibria in the years 2006 and 2008 by testing for two...

During 2007 and 2008 steam coal prices soared to unprecedented levels. Since then much has been speculated about the drivers of these price peaks. This paper is concerned with the costs of steam coal allocation in the seaborne market and their influence on the price equilibrium. It presents an...