This introductory essay briefly summarizes the eleven empirical studies of price setting and price adjustment that are included in this special issue. The studies, which use data from several European countries, were conducted as part of the European Central Bank's Inflation Persistence Network

This paper exploits enlargement of the European Union as a natural experiment to provide evidence for cluttering of the trade mark register in Europe. Enlargement increased regulatory uncertainty for pharmaceutical firms because the number of medical regulators that had to approve invented names...

We are concerned with economic analyses of markets from the perspective of supporting a decision maker selling in the market. The competitive pressure and the price formation are central issues. The goal of this paper is to highlight the remarkably different price patterns obtained from...

Firms that lie far behind the technological frontier have the most to gain from imitating the technology or management practices of others. That some firms converge relatively slowly to the productivity frontier suggests the existence of factors that cause them to underinvest in their...

While Italy's catch-up in the course of the 20th century has been nothing short of extraordinary, it has failed to produce a large number of global business players. Nonetheless, half a century ago an Italian company concluded what was at the time the largest-ever foreign takeover of a US...

The financial organisations engaged in the electricity and natural gas markets were forced to change, due to the deregulation process. The presence of new players in the markets and changes in demand obliged the existing companies to react. This reaction was not limited to an aggressive...