The effect of labour costs on industry profits, employment and labour income is at the heart of the current European debate on industry competitiveness. High wages paid in European countries such as Germany are generally considered harmful for industry profitability. Although, high wages also...

We document the behavior of trade prices during the Great Trade Collapse of 2008-2009 using transaction-level data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. First, we find that differentiated manufactures exhibited marked stability in their trade prices during the large decline in their trade...

The intellectual breakthrough contributed by the new growth theory was the recognition that investments in knowledge and human capital endogenously generate economic growth through the spillover of knowledge. Endogenous growth theory does not explain how or why spillovers occur. The missing link...

This Paper uses a unique representative firm level data set to analyse the effect of domestic and international competitive pressure and ownership changes in three emerging economies, Bulgaria Poland and Romania. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: Domestic competitive pressure,...

We survey the empirical literature analysing the process of enterprise restructuring in transition economies. The survey provides new insights into the relative effectiveness of different reform policies, and into how this effectiveness varies across regions. We study the effects of...

We extend the literature on exclusive dealing by allowing the incumbent and the potential entrant to merge. This uncovers new effects. First, exclusive deals can be used to improve the incumbent’s bargaining position in the merger negotiation. Second, the incumbent finds it easier to elicit...

This paper analyses the incentives of the equityholders of a leveraged company to shut it down in a continuous time, stochastic environment. Keeping the firm as an ongoing concern has an option value but equity and debt holders value it differently. Equity holders' decisions exhibit excessive...

This Paper investigates whether the efficiency effect of product market dispersion is a function of the infrastructural and policy environment. We hypothesise that more developed transportation and communication infrastructure and lower government regulation may reduce transaction costs,...

In this study we derive a structural econometric model of learning by doing with multiproduct competition from a dynamic oligopoly game. We show the importance to account for multiproduction effects through product differentiation when measuring learning by doing. Using quarterly firm-level data...

The goal of this essay is to bring the work of organizational ecologists on population dynamics to the attention of economists. Following a relatively brief exposition of the basic structure of the arguments made by organizational ecologists, we explore a number of areas where...