More than one year ago the Czech Republic joined the European Union. After a period of hectic preparation and investment, many companies made the best of an easier access to new markets. Other firms, on the contrary, passed a year of a deep disillusionment discovering that the world is not...

This paper examines the effect of Walmart's entry into Mexico on Mexican manufacturers of consumer goods. Guided by firm interviews that suggested substantial heterogeneity across firms in how they responded to Walmart's entry, we develop a dynamic industry model in which firms decide whether to...

The European Single Market is an ongoing project that will continue to further develop and adapt to changing realities. Traditional economic activities, and the administrative rules governing them, face the challenge of adapting to developments that blur the dividing lines, for example, between...

This paper examines the political complexities of retail liberalization in a developing country such as India in the overall context of liberalization of trade in services. Drawing on the experiences of other developing countries and India's experiences in the past decade of allowing FDI in...

Perfect integration eludes the real world, so we suggest a realistic benchmark standard for judging the extent of market integration in various economies. We estimate the degree of integration in the US product market, widely acknowledged to be the most integrated among geographically large...

In economic terms, electricity is a product that can be bought, sold or traded. Therefore, this product may give rise to a market. In the context of global economy, electric energy market had specific different features for its development, these situations being also found in the European...

Este trabajo se plantea como objetivo el análisis de la influencia que los recursos y capacidades de las empresas del sector de la distribución en España tienen para explicar la eficiencia productiva como medida de desempeño en el período 1997-2006 para un total de 42 sectores de actividad...

This article describes the ways in which cotton goods were commercialised during the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth. Several national cases are analysed: Britain, as the Workshop of the World; France, Germany, Switzerland and the US, as core economies; and Italy and Spain...

This article studies, from an agency perspective, the factors that explain the franchisor decision to integrate versus franchise its outlets. The analysis of a sample of Spanish franchise networks shows that franchising is more likely when: a) the costs of inefficient risk allocation between...

We study the effect of organizational choice and institutions on the performance of Spanish car dealerships. Using outlet-level data from 1994, we find that verticallyintegrated dealerships showed substantially lower labor productivity, higher labor costs and lower profitability than franchised...