We study the determinants of market structure in financial intermediation markets. We establish that the input of intermediation services-information-is always non-excludable (though not necessarily non-rival), and intermediaries cannot establish property rights over it. We show that...

Long-term relationships between business firms and investment banks are pervasive in developed security markets and there is evidence that better monitoring and information result from these relationships. Therefore, security markets should allocate resources better when an investment banking...

An influential literature has emerged around the premise that there exists an uneasy tension between (1) bank-firm relationships that promote incentives for firm-specific investments by banks, and (2) competition between banks that can destroy such incentives. This paper studies the industrial...

Spending on necessary infrastructure is likely to be cut back in coming decades, as the federal and state governments struggle with large debt burdens. This will hamper future growth, particularly given the dismal state of current infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly used to provide infrastructure services. Even though PPPs have the potential to increase efficiency and improve resource allocation, contract renegotiations have been pervasive. We show that existing accounting standards allow governments to...

Consider a bottleneck monopoly whose access change is regulated above marginal cost and provides access to an oligopoly of downstream firms. Should the monopolist be allowed to vertically integrate into the downstream market? For the general run of oligopolistic market structures, we show that a...

Este trabajo estudia los fundamentos de la regulación por empresa eficiente y las fórmulas que se usan para fijar los precios de sanitarias, distribuidoras eléctricas y empresas dominantes de teléfonos. Mostramos que implica tarificar a costo medio de largo plazo, lo óptimo cuando la...

Previous studies have acknowledged the tradeoff between relationships and competition in financial intermediation. In this paper, we explore the structural determinants of this tradeoff in the investment banking market, by deriving it from the underlying relationship technology. In the model,...