An intense academic debate has arisen recently concerning the crucial bedrock that underpins a corporate governance regime where widely-held public companies dominate. In the discourse, little has been said about the contribution of merger activity. The paper seeks to address this gap by...

A great merger wave occurring in the United States between 1897 and 1903 was the single most important event in a process that yielded the pattern of managerial control and dispersed share ownership which currently distinguishes America's corporate economy from arrangements in most other...

The spread of minority equity interest by large investors within productive sectors has garnered theattention of major institutions worldwide. This work draws a picture of such “common ownership”in the European energy industry in 2007-2018, by means of novel indicators covering both the...

We consider the effect of passive common ownership on the efficacy of leniency programs to disrupt and deter cartels. Besides reducing deterrence, passive common ownership restrains the incentives of firms to come forward and denounce the cartel and therefore further favors collusion

Consider a market with switching costs that is initially served by a monopolistic incumbent. How can a competitor successfully enter this market? We show that an offer to undercut the incumbent by a fixed margin serves this purpose. This strategy dominates traditional entry where the entrant...

The literature on the licensing of an innovation has mainly focused on some specific contract types. We show within the framework of a fairly general model that removing these contractual limitations will lead to extreme market outcomes. Specifically, we find that when the patentee can employ...

This paper analyzes tying and bundling as an entry deterrence tool. It shows that a multi-product firm can defend its monopoly position in one market via tying even when it does not have market power in another market. This is shown on a model with two complementary goods, each of which is...

We study the effects of merger on firm entry, product variety and prices in the retail craft beer market in California. We develop a new method to estimate multiple-discrete choice models in order to recover fixed costs. The method is based on bounds of conditional choice probabilities and does...

The burgeoning digital economy is characterized by providers offering their products and services to consumers in bundles. This is hardly surprising, given that the non-rival, non-excludable and infinitely expansible characteristics of digital goods with marginal cost of zero strongly favor use...

Effective competition in the Southern and East African regions requires independent rivals competing across borders and within domestic markets through innovation and effort, investment, product quality, and prices. To understand the constraints to more dynamic rivalry between firms within the...