In this paper, we study the furniture industry in two European countries, Germany and Italy. Although the two industries are characterized by very similar output and technology, they differ widely in terms of market organization, most notably the distribution of firms by size, and the...

Infrastructures—tangible, intangible, and institutional public facilities, from bridges to health care—are a vital precondition for economic and societal wellbeing. There has been an increasing awareness that we cannot rely on market forces for infrastructure investment and maintenance. In...

Starting from an industry where production is provided by a public monopolist, we look at the effects on the consumers' surplus of a sequence of reforms in network industry. Using a simple comparative statics framework, we find indifference conditions in consumers' surplus between respectively...

This article suggests that, at the root of the Great Recession, there are two imbalances: an unsustainable distribution of income in advanced economies, and a growing income gap between them and the rest of the world. Several factors have squeezed the share of labour income, particularly of less...

Public enterprises never disappeared in spite of several privatization waves in the last three decades. This paper offers some trends and possible rationales for their resilience. In a sample of the Forbes 2000 top corporations, as reviewed by OECD economists (Kowalski et al. 2013), we show that...

Privatization policy faces increasing popular opposition in Latin America. We test for the determinants of this discontent. We use the results of Latinobarometro (2002), a survey of a representative sample of 18522 individuals in 17 countries as our dependent variable of perception, and a...