The 1998 reform of the Italy's retail trade sector delegated the regulation of entry of large stores to the regional governments. We use the local variation in regulation to determine the effects of entry barriers on firms' performance for a representative sample of retailers. We address the...

A key feature of Soviet-type economies is the excessive concentration of production and the skewed size distribution of enterprises. This is the root cause of the `soft budget constraint' and a natural outcome of the political economy of these countries. Given entrenched political support for a...

How do banks react to increased competition? Recent banking theory offers conflicting predictions about the impact of competition on bank orientation - i.e., the choice of relationship based versus transactional banking - and bank industry specialization. We empirically investigate the impact of...

This paper develops an industry equilibrium model of vertical integration under contractual imperfections with specific input suppliers and external investors. I assume that vertical integration economizes on the needs for contracts with specific input suppliers at the cost of higher financial...

Using data from a unique pricing experiment, we investigate Vickrey’s conjecture that responsive pricing can be used to smooth both predictable and unpredictable demand shocks. Our evidence shows that increasing the responsiveness of price to demand conditions reduces the magnitude of...

Does targeted financial development favor small firms or large ones? And how do resulting changes in the distribution of firm size affect aggregate outcomes? We assess the macroeconomic implications of known stylized facts from the finance literature regarding firm size and financial frictions...

The so called flat-rate bias is a well documented phenomenon caused by consumers' desire to be insured against fluctuations in their billing amounts. This paper shows that expectation-based loss aversion provides a formal explanation for this bias. We solve for the optimal two-part tariff when...

We consider an empirical model of worldwide airline alliances that we apply to a large set of companies for the period 1995-2000. Using observations at the companies level, we estimate a cost, capacity, and demand system that accounts for cross-price elasticities. From the estimates, we shed...

The fifth world player aims to strenght domestic and overseas business development with its “Creative Office†philosophy, offering high value-added products and taking advantage of a profitable “on demand†production system. During 2009 almost all businesses worldwide will...