Using original data concerning organizational choices made by French local authorities awarding their local public services, we show how the spatial dimension may contribute to the debate on public-private partnerships. If geographic agglomeration of private operators may be explain by some...

We use an original database of 5000 French local public authorities to explore the impact of organizational choice and performance as measured by consumer prices. In quantifying the impact of the choice of public-private partnerships (PPPs) on performance, we consider the related issue of the...

Using an original database concerning 1102 French local public authorities in 2001, we explore the relationships between prices charged by private operators in water contracts and ex post competition. We show that prices charged in contracts in which operators are in a monopoly situation...

L’efficacité des partenariats public-privé (PPP) dans les industries de service public en réseau a été remise en cause par de nombreux auteurs. Une des défaillances majeure reprochée à ce type d’accords concerne le manque d’incitation de l’opérateur en place à investir en fin...

This book aims to disentangle the complex relationship between innovation and its potential determinants, paying special attention to the roles of governance and regulatory frameworks, and the ways in which the latter interact with other drivers of innovation such as competition and the...

Yardstick competition is an incentive regulatory tool which allows the regulator to introduce virtual competition into monopolistic industries. But as with any competitive environnement, regulated firms may have incentives to collude, thereby undermining the efficiency of the regulation. We...

The efficiency of franchise bidding schemes for network industries has been challenged by many authors. One of the problems with this kind of schemes concerns the lack of investment?s incentives of the incumbent at the end of the contract. The goal of this article is twofold. First, we explain...

We examine factors influencing the relative productivity of different geographic locations. Our analysis of the Canadian biotechnology industry during the 1990s reveals that inventive and uninventive locations are distinguishable within small geographic areas corresponding to roughly 7000 postal...

This paper investigates how network relations, proximity and their interplay affect collaboration and their inventive performance. Using patent citations as a proxy for patent quality, we investigate how the network and proximity characteristics of co-inventors enable them to access different...