The effect of labour costs on industry profits, employment and labour income is at the heart of the current European debate on industry competitiveness. High wages paid in European countries such as Germany are generally considered harmful for industry profitability. Though, high wages appear...

This paper examines the effects of various price-cap rules on peakload pricing. The issue recently gains practical importance in regulated network industries. The formal approach reveals that efficiency properties of various price-cap rules are, notwithstanding some problems, fairly good. A...

The delocation of firms is often viewed as a major outcome of a stiff environmental policy. In this paper, we study the impact of a strict anti-pollution policy pursued by a government on domestic firms locational decisions and determine the main variables that interact with such a policy. Some...

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...

The paper proposes an approach for evaluating the effect of flow fixed costs on the evaluation of environmental benefits with travel cost method. On a full annual perspective when recreational users incur relevant annual direct fixed expenses, their behaviour could be influenced by them. The...

We provide a model of dynamic duopoly in which firms face financial constraints and disappear when they are unable to fulfill them. We show that, in some cases, Cournot outputs are no longer supported in equilibrium, because if these outputs were set, a firm may have incentives to ruin the...

We use micro data on product prices linked to information on the firms that set them to test for selection effects (state dependence) in micro-level producer pricing. In contrast to using synthetic data from a canonical menu-cost model, we find very weak, if any, micro-level selection effects...