This paper presents an empirical assessment of the degree of competition within the Jamaican banking sector during the period 1998 to 2007. The popular H-statistic by Panzar and Rosse is utilised to estimate market power among the sample of banks. Using usual statistical tests, we are unable to reject monopoly/perfect collusion for the banking market in Jamaica. This contrasts with earlier find...

Millions of people lack access to affordable medicines. The intellectual property rules in the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) provide pharmaceutical companies with monopoly protections that allow them to market some drugs without competition by less costly generics. We examined availability of certain drugs in Guatemala and found that CAFTA intellectual property rules reduced acce...

Merchant electricity transmission investment is a practically relevant example of an unregulated investment with monopoly properties. However, while leaving the investment decision to the market, the regulator may decide to prohibit capacity withholding with a must-offer provision. This paper examines the welfare effects of a must-offer provision prior to the capacity choice, given three reason...

ing from distributional problems for the moment, there is little reason for treating this club good like a public good and for producing or allocating transport services according to public rules. On the other hand, the transport infrastructure is characterised by a sub-additivy of costs, and its use leads to external diseconomies. Therefore, a high level of public control is needed to prevent ...

The paper studies the incentives to form collusive agreements when goods can be traded in second-hand markets. It will be shown that such incentives crucially depend on the rate of depreciation of the durable good and on consumer heterogeneity. The main contribution of the paper shows that an active second-hand market may strengthen the incentives to collude, as do policies that affect the func...

THE ROLE OF THE PRIVATE SECTOR in the production of road services has been extensively studied and has generated substantial theoretical and empirical work (Block 2006; Carnis 2006; Roth 2006). There is debate as to the modalities of privatisation (Block 2006; Carnis 2003; Hoppe 1991) and the functioning of a market system for the providing of road services (Carnis 2001; Roth 1996; Block 1979)....

Market power and adverse selection are prevalent features of the market for pre-paid health plans. However, most of the literature on adverse selection considers extreme cases: either perfect competition or monopoly. If instead health plans are horizontally differentiated, then (i) profits derived from each low risk are higher than from each high risk and (ii) when the profits derived from each...

We model the market for news as a two-sided market where newspapers sell news to readers who value accuracy and sell space to advertisers who value advert-receptive readers. In this setting, monopolistic newspapers under-report or bias news that sufficiently reduces advertiser profits. Paradoxically, increasing the size of advertising eventually leads competing newspapers to reduce advertiser b...

We examine the market power of a seller who repeatedly offers upgraded versions of a product. In the case of pure monopoly, the seller also controls compatibility across versions. In the case of an entrant who offers an upgrade, the incumbent seller also controls subsequent interoperability across versions. We argue that control of compatibility and interoperability does not allow an incumbent ...