This report identifies the factors behind structural growth of the business services industry, applying growth decomposition and qualitative analysis.

In this paper we discuss the incentives of a welfare maximizing government to implement strategic trade policy when there is, on the one hand, uncertainty about the relevant market information (like the type of competition, demand function, cost function, etc.), but, on the other hand, the...

The fundamental contribution of the paper is to contest the view that greater market contestability has non-negative effects on market performance. In a model where employees pose a threat of potential entry, we demonstrate that a reduction in barriers to entry causes no fall in industry price...

The theoretical literature on industrial organization has been argued that firms hold excess capacity to deter entry. However, empirical analysis did not provide much support to this hypothesis. In this paper we show that the dominant firms may hold excess capacity not for entry deterrence but...

This paper investigates the interplay of investment irreversibility, predatory behavior, and limited liability in a duopoly with aggregate demand uncertainty. We find that limited liability and investment irreversibility is likely to produce predatory behavior in very competitive industries in...

This paper develops a simple model of a R&D race with two sources of uncertainty about the innovation. The first is about its technical feasibility, and, the second, if the innovation is technically feasible, about its timing. Firms have prior beliefs that the innovation is technically feasible....

There is growing recognition that organizational innovations can have a major influence on the geography of economic activity. Yet, very little is known about the mechanisms and geographic preconditions underlying their diffusion, particularly at the global level. In this paper we seek to fill...

This article summarises a wider report on the current state of best practice benchmarking in UK and US commercial banking.

While the relationship between portfolio risk and capital and its interrelationship with operating efficiency has been explored elsewhere, limited evidence has been forthcoming on the interrelationships among capital, non-performing loans and productivity. The paper makes an attempt to examine...

This paper contains a model of waste elimination through design. It argues for the importance of managing design complexity in improving cost, quality, variety, and time--to--market performance variables. Management of design complexity is identified with creation, choice, and application of...