We study how the migration from an old to a new technology is affected by the access price to the old technology. We show that both the incumbent and the regulator are willing to set a very high access price to accelerate consumers' migration to the new technology. When the quality of the old...

Open source is an example of user-centric innovation initiated by an individual or group of users to satisfy their specific needs; the more a software evolves towards a stable release able to address the requirements of its developers, the more successful the project. In this paper we use a...

Despite a general trend of lower charges for mobile calls, prices for international roaming calls have remained at levels surprisingly high. The apparent reluctance of European mobile network operators to lower roaming tariffs is generating many antitrust concerns. This paper discusses in a two...

This paper presents a model of competition between an incumbent and an entrant firm in telecommunications. The entrant has the option to enter the market with or without having preliminary invested in its own infrastructure; in case of facility based entry, the entrant has also the option to...

The relationship between fiscal and financial euro area indicators and sovereign yield spreads has changed after the start of the financial crisis. Increased financial volatility has magnified the impact of fiscal conditions as drivers of sovereign risk, has widened the set of macroeconomic...

In a simple stochastic overlapping generation model, individuals work when young and retire when old, generations’ productivity is affected by a serially uncorrelated random shock, and fiat money and nominal public debt are the only storable assets. In this setting, we show that social...

The design of fully funded pension plans is affected by governance and incentive problems, as underlined by the experience of several countries. The analytic perspective of contract theory allows to detect the nature of such problems: pension-fund managers have strong incentives to manipulate...

This paper estimates Taylor rules featuring instabilities in policy parameters, switches in policy shocks' volatility, and time-varying trend inflation using post-WWII U.S. data. The model embedding the stochastic target performs better in terms of data-fit and identification of the changes in...

We analyze the optimality of alternative mechanisms of public provision of private goods affecting the productive capacity of households (e.g. education, health-care) rather than directly their welfare. Opting out mechanisms - often considered a tool to focus social expenditure - are proven to...

The economic literature on PPPs has generally overlooked agency problems within private consortia. We provide a first contribution in this direction, relying on a simple incomplete contracts framework where a Builder and an Operator set up a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) to carry out a contract...