We document the presence of multiple and varied constraints to small and medium firm growth. This presents both a practical problem for business training programs and a challenge to academic economists trying to identify mechanisms though which these programs may affect outcomes. External...

This paper examines incentives for exclusive distribution of content in the presence of advertising. A monopoly seller of content - such as televisation rights to popular sports - may contract with one or both of two competing distributors, charging lump-sum fees. When distributors are...

Media industries are important drivers of popular culture. A large fraction of leisure time is devoted to radio, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, and television (the illustrative example henceforth). Most advertising expenditures are incurred for these media. They are also mainly supported...

Content providers rely on advertisers to pay for content. TiVo, remote controls, and pop-up ad blockers are examples of ad-avoidance technologies that allow consumers to view content without ads, and thereby siphon off the content without paying the ‘price.’ We examine the content...

Payment card associations offer both debit and credit cards and, until recently, engaged in a tie-in on the merchant side through the so-called honour-all-cards (HAC) rule. The HAC rule came under attack on the grounds that the credit and debit card markets are separate markets and that the...

Many utility markets are now being opened to competition, and some regulators have expressed the hope that this will make the regulation of consumer prices unnecessary. In this paper, entrants offer (differentiated) 'added value', but consumers incur a switching cost if they buy from one of...

The objective of the paper is to elaborate a simulation model to analyse inter and intra-modal competition in the transport industry, based on game theory models. In our setting, consumers choose a transport mode and an operator to travel on a given city-pair; operators strategically decide on...

This paper evaluates the effects of liberalizing access to the space sector, as currently envisaged by the EC Commission. We undertake an econometric evaluation of the degree of scale economies in satellite operations and calibrate a Cournot model of competition in which the effect of...

Payer-driven competition has been widely advocated as a means of increasing efficiency in health care markets. The 1990s reforms to the UK health service followed this path. We examine whether competition led to better outcomes for patients, as measured by death rates after treatment following...

In this paper, we present for the first time a qualitative and quantitative comparison between trade in services and trade in goods at firm level for the same country. We focus first on static features of trade such as participation rates,, firms' characteristics, heterogeneity, concentration...