Persistent shifts in equilibria are likely to arise in oligopolistic markets and may be detrimental to the measurement of conduct, related markups and intensity of competition. We develop a cointegrated VAR (vector autoregression) based approach to detect long-run changes in conduct when data...

Intertemporal shifts in conduct, such as a transition from competitive to anticompetitive behavior, induce shifts in the firms' equilibrium price configurations. Such shifts generate non-stationary price dynamics in addition to those which originate from exogenous fundamentals. We exploit this...

The German banking sector is undergoing tremendous changes. Its' time-tested three-pillar model has come under fire from with-in and with-out. On the one hand, both inter- as well as intra-sector rivalry is increasing. On the other hand, the European Union is forcing the government to liberalize...