This paper assesses the effectiveness of vertical industrial policies within the EU. Vertical industrial policy is defined as government support for specific firms or industries (picking winners or supporting losers) and measured by state aid granted by Member States to the manufacturing...

The goal of this paper is to provide an assessment of the EU policies that pursue the creation of a single banking market. The paper evaluates the degree of integration of EU banking markets, the impact of the integration process on the conduct, the structure and the performance of the industry...

This paper provides a critical analysis of some of the key features of merger policy as understood and practiced in leading jurisdictions such as the European Community and the United States. It focuses first on a discussion of the gradual move of merger policy towards the examination of...

European banking has gone through a process of deregulation and integration which reaches its peak with the adoption of the euro in 1999. This paper argues that the characteristics in terms of seller concentration of the new equilibrium with integrated markets will depend on the nature of...

The telecommunications industry is usually among the most concentrated of the economy. Nevertheless, mergers and acquisitions are quite common in the industry since the late 1990's and they seem to pick up after the burst of the telecoms bubble. Will this trend towards concentration last into...

This paper analyzes the impact of deregulation and market integration policies on the structure of European banking markets. It argues that whether European integration will lead to large increases in EU-wide concentration will depend on the extent to which competition in banking is based on...

The contributions to this timely volume explore the social implications of labour market reforms, and assess the complex relationship between the economic and non-economic aspects of labour institutions. The authors ascertain that labour market systems have important social dimensions, including...

The 1990s witnessed significant regulatory changes in several Spanish network industries such as electricity, telecommunications, natural gas and oil. This article provides an assessment of these developments, trying to ascertain what goals policy-makers attempted to achieve with the...

This paper presents new data on telecommunications reform for a cross section of countries. We measure telecommunications reform along two dimensions: entry barriers and regulatory independence. This data set is combined with a comprehensive set of performance, institutional and political data...