This paper, based on my concluding remarks at the “Colloquium on the Economic Aspects of Gambling Regulation: EU and US Perspectives” held at Tilburg in November 2006, discusses the question why, in Europe, some service sectors (such as network industries) are liberalised, while others (like...

Abstract: Using a newly constructed dataset on German hospitals, which includes 24 process and outcome indicators of clinical quality, we test whether quality has increased in various clinical areas since the introduction of mandatory quality reports and the online publication of part of the...

We introduce a new measure of competition: the elasticity of a firm’s profits with respect to its cost level. A higher value of this profit elasticity (PE) signals more intense competi- tion. Using firm-level data we compare PE with the most popular competition measures such as the price cost...