The process of assigning property rights to land in the American Great Plains resulted in farms that were too small to be economically viable. These farms were prime contributors to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The path dependence resulting from the initial assignment of property rights on the...

Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have been successfully used as an industrial policy tool in many countries. Efforts to create SEZs in Tanzania began in 2002, and were stepped up through the establishment of the Export Processing Zone Authority (EPZA) in 2006. A number of state-run zones are now in...

Since the early 2000s, there has been rapid growth in the number and spread of supermarkets in southern Africa. This paper is a synthesis of key findings of studies undertaken in Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe on the expansion of supermarkets and the impact this has had on...

This paper uses hysteresis to develop the concept of policy lock-in and lock-out. Policy changes may near-irrevocably change the economy's structure, thereby changing the distribution of wealth, income and power. That may lock-in policy by changing the political equilibrium. Exit costs that...

Local content policies in the context of extractive industries have attracted increased interest in recent years. Most countries with a significant extractive industry have included local content requirements either in their legislation or exploitation contracts. Such efforts may be constrained...

The paper discusses the practical possibilities of achieving increased downstream processing and the policies that are commonly used for this purpose. It reviews the reasons why forward vertical integration is not always an optimal choice for extractive industry companies. It finds little...

We examine the relation between consumer search and equilibrium prices when collusion is endogenously determined. We develop a theoretical model and show that average price is a U-shaped function of the measure of searchers: prices are highest when there are no searchers (local monopoly power)...

We study a duopoly model where each firm chooses personalized prices for its targeted consumers, who can be active or passive in identity management. Active consumers can bypass price discrimination and have access to the price offered to non-targeted consumers, which passive consumers cannot....

Regulators and the firms they regulate interact repeatedly. Over the course of these interactions, the regulator collects data that contains information about the firm's idiosyncratic private characteristics. This paper studies the case in which the regulator uses information gleaned from past...

The topic of alternative price zone configurations is frequently discussed in Central Western Europe where - so far - national borders coincide with borders of price zones. Reconfiguring these price zones is one option in order to improve congestion management, foster trading across borders of...