In this paper, we analyze the issue of optimal tariffs when the Northern and Southern firms compete in quantities in an imperfectly competitive Northern market and there are Ž . potentially varying degrees of intellectual property rights IPR violation by the South. IPR Ž . violation is reflected through the leakage of technological knowledge ‘‘spillovers’’ from the Northern to the Southern firm...

This paper reviews competition policies in Chile. It argues that competition policy should strive to reduce entry, fixed and variable costs where that is technically feasible; reduce the costs of reallocating resources across firms and sectors; and foster tough price competition. It also shows that reducing concentration is the wrong policy goal because tougher price competition will increase e...

Prior work suggests that heterogeneous information or weak incentives for solvency could have caused some general liability insurers to charge low ex ante prices during the early 1980s and mid-to-late 1990s, putting downward pressure on other firms’ prices and plausibly aggravating subsequent periods of rapid premium growth. We analyse whether the 1994–1999 ‘‘soft’’ market in medical malpractic...

This paper reviews analytical work carried out by central banks that participated in the Autumn Meeting of Central Bank Economists on “The evolving inflation process” which the BIS hosted on 28-29 October 2005. The paper first discusses efforts to document the univariate statistical properties of inflation and how they have changed over the last decades. It then reviews studies of disaggregated...

We analyze the effect of Wal-Mart’s entry into the grocery market using a unique store-level price panel data set. We use OLS and two IV specifications to estimate the effect of Wal-Mart’s entry on competitors’ prices of 24 grocery items across several categories. Wal-Mart’s price advantage over competitors for these products averages approximately 10%. On average, competitors’ response to entr...

This paper examines the e¤ects of exclusive dealing contracts o¤ered by an incumbent distributor. The e¤ectiveness of exclusive dealing contracts o¤ered by distributors is quite di¤erent from those o¤ered by incumbent manufacturers. The traditional literature has focused solely on exclusive dealing contracts made by incumbent manufacturers and has derived multiple equilibria within homogeneous ...

Merger activity is intense during economic booms and subdued during recessions. This paper provides a non-financial explanation for this observable pattern. We construct a model in which the target—by setting the takeover price—screens the acquirer on his (expected) ability to realize synergy gains when merging. In an economic boom, it is less profitable to sort out relatively “bad fit” acquire...

In this paper, we consider the competition of providers of information products against P2P networks that offer illegal versions of the information products. Depending on the generic cost factor of downloading—incorporating factors including, among other things, the degree of legal enforcement of intellectual property rights—we find that the firm may employ pricing strategies to either deter th...

This paper estimates a structural demand model for commercial bank deposit services in order to measure the effects on consumers given dramatic changes in bank services throughout US branching deregulation in the 1990s. Following the discrete choice literature, consumer decisions are based on prices and bank characteristics. Consumers are found to respond to deposit rates, and to a lesser exten...

In this paper, we examine the usefulness of the dominant firm model of price leadership to serve as a benchmark for organizing behavior in laboratory markets. This well established model, whose origins can be traced back over a hundred years, has been recently applied to such landmark antitrust cases as Standard Oil and Alcoa and more recently to the analysis of deregulated markets for electric...