This paper explores how costly price adjustment and strategic interaction may cause a leader-follower configuration to arise. While most imperfect models predict that price-setters will synchronize their moves, we show that leadership generates stable staggering.

A fundamental question in industrial organization regards the relationship between price and the number of sellers. This relationship has been particularly important in the pharmaceutical industry where legislative changes were specifically designed to foster competition. Previous research on...

Le marche unique et la monnaie unique constituent des elements complementaires d'une strategie qui doit permettre a l'Union europeenne de mieux faire face aux defis de la globalisation. En effet, l'arrivee de la monnaie unique devrait renforcer certains des effets induits par le programme de...

We analyze third degree price discrimination by an upstream monopolistto a continuum of heterogeneous downstream firms. The novelty of ourapproach is to recognize that customizing prices may be costly, whichintroduces an interesting trade-off. As a consequence, partial pricediscrimination arises...

Using a measure of competition based on the Panzar-Rosse model, this paper explains bank competition across 76 countries on the basis of various determinants. Studies explaining banking competition are rare and typically insuffciently robust as they are based on a limited number of countries...

This paper reviews analytical work carried out by central banks that participated in the Autumn Meeting of Central Bank Economists on "The evolving inflation process" which the BIS hosted on 28-29 October 2005. The paper first discusses efforts to document the univariate statistical properties...

We examine the impact of bank competition and institutional factors on net firm entry in a sample of European manufacturing industries over the 1995-2006 period. Taking into account industry differences in the need for external finance, we find that bank competition helps firm entry. In...

We discuss evidence that the microcredit industry in Bangladesh has seen emergence of large variations in the size of the microfinance institutions operating in the market-- on the one hand, there are large national-level MFIs, while on the other hand, small localized MFIs operating only within...

The removal of the lower bound on the EUR/CHF exchange rate in January 2015 provides a unique setting to study the implications of a large and sudden appreciation in an otherwise stable macroeconomic environment. Using transaction-level data on non-durable goods purchases by Swiss consumers, we...

I use a unique data set of retail food prices to analyze mergers between supermarket chains. The data allow for an examination of the effects of mergers on prices, the frequency of promotions, and the depth of promotions. I find that increases in a chain’s share of the total US food sales are...