This chapter provides an economic perspective on merger policy for failing firms and declining industries. It examines the evolution of the failing firm defense and the underlying principles of the defense, including financial condition, exit of assets due to the inability to reorganize, and...

One of the most robust empirical regularities in the political economy of trade is the persistence of protection. This paper explains persistent protection in terms of the interaction between industry adjustment, lobbying, and the political response. Faced with a trade shock, owners of...

This paper presents a simple North-South model of endogenous growth, based on learning by doing, which is consistent with the following empirical observations: (i) the price of investment goods relative to consumption goods has been falling for the last 40 years in most industrialized countries,...

Die ökonomischen Funktionen des Wettbewerbs lassen sich in statische und dynamische Ziele unterteilen. Unter den statischen Zielen versteht man Konsumentensouveränität, die Allokationsfunktion und die Verteilungsfunktion. Die dynamischen bestehen aus Anpassung- und Fortschrittsfunktion....

One of the most robust empirical regularities in the political economy of trade is the persistence of protection. This paper explains persistent protection in terms of the interaction between industry adjustment, lobbying, and the political response. Faced with a trade shock, owners of...

The paper uses a political economy framework to explain the empirical observation that trade protection is persistent. The assumptions that are shown to generate endogenous tariff persistence in the model are quite plausible: Agents are uncertain about future prices, tariffs are affected by...

According to Stigler [1951], vertical disintegration should be the typical development in growing industries, vertical integration in declining industries. The basic argument is that firms will spin off production stages subject to increasing returns to scale in response to market growth. This...

Recent empirical work suggests that declining industries lobby more successfully for policy concessions than do growing industries. This paper presents a novel and simple explanation for this phenomenon. It is shown that an industry in decline is constrained in its ability to raise revenue...