This paper examines optimal two-period financial contracts between firms in a product market on the one side and banks as creditors on the other side. Similar to the Bolton-Scharfstein contracts, banks can mitigate the moral hazard problem of truthfully revealing the ex ante unknown profits of...

In the course of the liberalization of European energy markets, the German government opted - diverging from all other European countries - for Negotiated Third-Party Access. In this article we analyze if, theoretically, this institutional regime can be superior to regulation. We review...

According to European directives the German state deregulated several sectors which had been protected monopolies for a long time. A regulatory authority was established for the telecommunication sector with the competence to decide about the access conditions to the bottleneck "local loop". If...