Long-term minimum return guarantees sold by European life insurers increasingly become binding as interest rates decline. While participating contracts embedding these guarantees are designed to share market risk across investor cohorts when guarantees are not binding, we study how binding...

Productivity growth has been slow in many continental European countries over the last few decades, especially in comparison with the United States. It has been argued that lack of product market competition and poor corporate governance are two of the main reasons for this phenomenon. However,...

This paper derives a three stage Cournot duopoly game for research collaboration, research expenditures and product market competition. The amount of knowledge firms can absorb from other firms is made dependent on their own research efforts, e.g., firms' absorptive capacity is treated as an...

Using a large panel of German manufacturing firms over the years 1986-1996, this study examines the impact of corporate governance and market discipline on productivity growth. We find that firms under concentrated ownership tend to show significantly higher productivity growth. Financial...

This paper discusses the relation between trade and competition, revising the literature and using indicators, build with Brazilian industrial survey (PIA/IBGE) and foreign trade (Comtrade) data. The premise is that the structure of domestic competition is explained by concentration indices,...

This paper shows that the supply side of credit is a major factor for the phenomenonof hampered interest rate pass-through in monopolistic banking markets. Our data,covering all 1,555 small and medium sized banks in Germany, provides a clear wayto partial out demand shocks; we are thus able to...