Standard analysis of mergers in oligopolies along the lines of the popular Farrell-Shapiro-Framework (FSF) relies regarding its policy conclusions sensitively on the assumption that rational agents will only propose privately profitable mergers. If this assumption held, a positive external...

Dominant or apparently dominant internet platform increasingly become subject to both antitrust investigations and further-reaching political calls for regulation. While Google is currently in the focus of the discussion, the next candidate is already on the horizon - the ubiquitous online...

This article examines the economic effect of computer animation movie success by using data from all widely released feature length movies between 2011 and 2014, and all computer animated movies in North America between 1995 and 2014. We show that computer animated movies successfully attract...

Existing theoretical and empirical studies on Media Bias are subjects of controversial discussions in the literature. However, scientific literatures on Media Bias establish empirical evidence for a positive impact of advertising volume on media coverage. To get in line with the debated...

This paper compares trends in key economic, political and social development outcomes in the Philippines with those of Latin America, particularly since the 1990s. To do so, it uses standard indicators of development, including measures of institutional quality and good governance. The paper...

Differential delivery dates (D3) of contract obligations characterize most contracts in real life. D3 puts the contractor who delivers last, in the words of David Hume (1769), in “a position of advantage” because reneging on his/her obligation can be profitable. Ex-ante remedies such as...

Evaluation studies on conditional cash transfers (CCT) in the Philippines found small if not insignificantly different from zero effects on household consumption. We use propensity score matching to examine how recipients made use of the money they received, taking into account possible changes...

A framework is proposed to subsume public goods and common-pool resources, respectively, as specific cases of positive and negative externalities. A pure public good is a positive externality whose appropriable benefits are too small or too uncertain relative to the high private cost for anyone...

The economic catch-up of the East Asian region went hand-in-hand with the emergence and even dominance of large quasi-state or private conglomerates. Such for example were the Zaibatsus in the pre-WWII and the Keiretsus of the post-WWII Japan and the Chaebols of South Korea which enjoyed...

We propose a formal re-definition of the concept market failure based on the idea of the imperfect state. In the Neo-classical taxonomy, a decentralized regime of exchange is a market failure if its laissez faire equilibrium solution is welfare-dominated by a technically feasible alternative. If...