Why do some people become entrepreneurs (and others don't)? Why are firms so heterogeneous, and many firms so small? To start, the paper briefly documents evidence from the empirical literature that the relationship between entrepreneurship and education is U-shaped, that many entrepreneurs...

This paper uses the BEEPS firm-level data to study the process of convergence of transition countries with developed market economies. The primary focus of the study is on competition and market structure, finance and the structure of lending to firms, and how firms respond to the economic...

I analyze the implications of bundling on price competition in a market for complementary products. Using a model of imperfect competition with product differentiation, I identify the incentives to bundle for two types of demand functions and study how they change with the size of the bundle....

This paper provides a simple theoretical model in which a vertically-distorted industry structure is considered in an international setting. Fixed costs, existing in both the final good and intermediate good sectors, result in a bilateral externality. Production as well as equity ownership...

We provide empirical evidence on market positioning by firms, in terms of market niche, distance from technological frontier and dispersion. We focus on the switch industry, a sub-market of the Local Area Network industry, in the nineties. Market positioning is a function of the type of firms...

This paper examines the time-consuming process of matching the two sides of a market each having diverse characteristics. This is cast in a labor market setting where workers of different skills need be matched with different machine qualities to produce output. I characterize the efficient...

This article analyses the impact of the reference price system on the price-setting strategies of the pharmaceutical firms and on the level of generic usage. This model is the first to take explicitly into account the impact of the reference price mechanism on the level of competition between...

We analyze the implications of a market imperfection related to the inability to establish intellectual property rights, that we label {\it unverifiable communication}. Employees are able to collude with external parties selling ``knowledge capital'' of the firm. The firm organizer engages in...

If we take into account the spatial dimension of markets, prices of incumbent firms may be higher, and consumer surplus may be lower with competition. This result obtains unambiguously, even in the highly competitive case of Bertrand competition. <P> In Mikro- und Industrieökonomik ist scheinbar...</p>

This paper aims to provide a consistent empirical methodology for investigating the level of Minimum Efficient Scale (MES) in a single product industry, through the assessment of relative productive performance. Two deterministic approaches are used to evaluate firm-level technical efficiency :...