COMPETITION IN NEWSPAPER MARKETS, RENT SEEKING AND THE QUALITY OF INFORMATION. The availability of adequate information is one of the most important conditions for making markets and political systems work efficiently. The power of influencing, enhancing or concealing information on certain...

Static tax-benefit microsimulation models (MSM) are widely used and reputed tools for public policy analysis but a more than careful use of them is compelling. This paper focuses on the analysis of MSM output, suggesting to use nonparametric kernel methods rather than most often used histograms...

We build a generalised growth model of horizontal product innovation with human capital accumulation in which the monopolistic mark-up set in the uncompetitive sector and the degree of returns to specialization are disentangled. We find that product market power has a positive growth effect when...

Rise and decline of the notion of "own rate of interest" in Sraffa. The notion of commodity rate of interest, introduced by Sraffa in a short review-article published in1932, is taken up by Keynes a few years later under the label of own rate of interest. The latter expression soon spreads in...

We extend the theory of advertising as a quality signal, using a model where an entrant can choose to advertise by comparing its product to that of an established incumbent. Comparative advertising, comparing quality of one’s own product to that of a rival’s, empowers the latter to file for...

The research question addressed by this paper is a simple one: are European consumers happy with the services provided by the utilities after two decades of reforms? We focus on electricity, gas, water, telephone in the EU 15 Member States. The variables we analyse are consumers’ satisfaction...

Directional derivatives are the ideal tool to model simultaneous shifts of the instruments of economic policy. Provided the equilibrium solution of an oligolistic model are differentiable with respect to the parameter, such a problem can be easily solved considering shift in single instruments,...