The literature analysing social efficiency of entry argues that entry is always socially excessive in industries with asymmetric cost firms and no scale economies. We show that exogenous cost asymmetry is responsible for this result. In a simple model with endogenous R&D investment by the more...

We show the effects of product differentiation and competition on technology licensing by an outside innovator. Both the innovator and the society are better off under royalty licensing compared to auction (or fixed-fee) if the number of potential licensees is sufficiently large, irrespective of...

Considering a move from monopoly to duopoly, Bastos et al. (“Open shop unions and product market competition”, 2010, Canadian Journal of Economics) provides open-shop union, where the union density is less than one, as a theoretical reason for the evidence of a positive relationship between...

This paper assesses the role of sales as a feature of price dynamics using scanner data. The study analyses an extensive, high frequency panel of supermarket prices consisting of over 230,000 weekly price observations on around 500 products in 15 categories of food stocked by the UK’s seven...

A new estimator of bid-ask spreads is presented. When the trade direction is known, any estimate of the spread is associated with a unique series of conjectural mid-prices derived by adjusting the observed transaction price by half the estimated spread. It is shown that the covariance of...

Several de facto exchange rate regime classifications have been widely used in empirical research, but they are known to disagree with one another to a disturbing extent. We dissect the algorithms employed and argue that they can be significantly improved. We implement the improvements, and show...

The performance of bid-ask spread estimators is investigated using simulation experiments. All estimators are much more accurate if the data are sampled at high frequency. In high-frequency data, the Huang-Stoll estimator, which requires order flow information, generally outperforms Roll-type...

The paper proves that in two-player logit form symmetric contests with concave success function, commitment to a particular strategy does not increase a player's payoff, while in contests with more than two players it does. The paper also provides a contest-like game in which commitment does not...