Can bank competition help attenuate the prevalence of zombie firms? Motivated by a stylized model, this paper studies the effect of bank competition on the formation of zombie firms in two stages: the formation of distressed firms and distressed firms obtaining zombie lending. Using China’s...

A series of market reforms were introduced in 2002 in the Chinese wholesale coal power sector. The period immediately after is widely recognized as having had inconsistent service and many blackouts in China, and it is generally accepted that many of the reforms were not fully enacted. Yet,...

This paper shows that local banking market conditions affect mortality rates in the United States. Exploiting the staggered relaxation of branching restrictions in the 1990s across states, we find that banking deregulation decreases local mortality rates. This effect is driven by a decrease in...

We study the impact of legal restrictions pertaining to pharmacy licences on hospitalizations. We use a reform approved in 2012 in Italy that increased the number of pharmacies allowed to operate in the national territory by 8%. We set up a regression discontinuity design exploiting monthly data...

The index published in Economic Freedom of the World measures the degree to which the policies and institutions of countries are supportive of economic freedom. The cornerstones of economic freedom are personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to enter markets and compete, and security of the...

This study investigates the effects of electric utility deregulation on (a) the cost of generated electricity, (b) shifts in revenue sources toward the regulated portions of customers’ bills, and (c) changes in average all-in electricity cost in deregulated states relative to similar states...

The paper investigates the effect of electricity liberalisation on the variety of clean energy patent’ search space to asses whether a more competitive electricity market can foster the development of radical clean-energy technologies. This idea is tested using a cross-section of patents filed...