Frequently, aspiring entrants have only limited information about their potential rivals’ entry decisions. As a result, the outcome of the entry game may be that more firms enter than the market can sustain; or, at least, that unnecessary entry investments are made. We refer to these outcomes...

This paper studies the impact that capital market imperfections have on the natural selection of the most efficient firms by estimating the effect of the pre-deregulation level of leverage on the survival of trucking firms after the Carter deregulation. Highly leveraged carriers are less likely...

In the past four years, and under pressure from the EC authorities, most constraints on air transport prices in the European Community have been removed. This paper concentrates on the effects of increased competition on fare behaviour. It uses an unpublished 1990 dataset on eight fare...

The paper provides policymakers and regulators with an overview of the more relevant theoretical issues related to the pricing of access to ensure that the political debate around practical concerns is solidly grounded. The paper discusses in detail the importance of access pricing in the...

This paper seeks to bridge the gap between economists focused on designing competitive market mechanisms and engineers focused on the physical attributes and engineering requirements they perceive as being needed for operating a reliable electric power system. The paper starts by deriving the...

This paper examines the impact of regulatory intervention to cut termination rates of calls from fixed lines to mobile phones. Under quite general conditions of competition, theory suggests that lower termination charges will result in higher prices for mobile subscribers, a phenomenon known as...

We study whether the 2002 deregulation and vertical unbundling of the Chinese electricity sector has boosted productivity in the generation segment of the industry. Controlling explicitly for sources of price-heterogeneity across firms and for firm-fixed effects, we find deregulation to be...

This paper reviews the theories of corruption in regulated sectors to further understand the impact of corruption and the ways in which it can be reduced. The aim is to draw out the policy implications of the different theoretical approaches and to examine the support that can be garnered for...

When a supply and demand model is recursive, with errors uncorrelated across the two equations, ordinary least squares (OLS) is the recommended estimation procedure. Supply to a daily fish market is determined by the previous night’s catch, so this would appear to be a good example of a...

Using two matched plant level skills and productivity datasets for UK manufacturing we document that (i) more productive firms hire more skilled workers: in 2000, plants at the top decile of the TFP distribution (controlling for their four-digit industry) hired workers with, on average, around...