How many cartels are there? The answer is important in assessing the need for competition policy. We present a Hidden Markov Model that answers the question, taking into account that often we do not know whether a cartel exists in an industry or not. We take the model to data from a period of...

We study the effects of politics on public procurement in Swedish municipalities in 1990-98 using data on cleaning services. No procuring municipality committed to a standard auction format or to an explicit scoring rule. Political identity of the governing party is not correlated with the...

How many cartels are there? The answer is important in assessing the efficiency of competition policy. We present a Hidden Markov Model that answers the question, taking into account that often we do not know whether a cartel exists in an industry or not. Our model identifies key policy...

Building on a 1998 study by Rajan and Zingales, this paperexamines the impact of both general and government financial support on privateR&D rates and on firm expansion.A description of the theoreticalbackground for this research is provided with an emphasis on the subsidizationof small- and...

Commercialization of innovations frequently stumbles. A prominent recent example is the early (i.e. pre-3G) mobile phone-enabled Internet services, whose European take-up was slower than expected. To determine why, we build a structural model of demand for such services and estimate it using...

We study cartel contracts using data on 18 contract clauses of 109 legal Finnish manufacturing cartels. One third of the clauses relate to raising profits; the others deal with instability through incentive compatibility, cartel organization, or external threats. Cartels use three main...

How many cartels are there? The answer is important in assessing the need for competition policy. We present a Hidden Markov Model that answers the question, taking into account that often we do not know whether a cartel exists in an industry or not. We take the model to data from a period of...

Using 15 years of data on Finnish twins, we find that 24% (54%) of the variance of women's (men's) lifetime income is due to genetic factors and that the contribution of the shared environment is negligible. We link these figures to policy by showing that controlling for education reduces the...

We examine whether the organisation of individual researchers into departments has an impact on the average research quality, beyond the impact of the individuals themselves. Using data on science disciplines generated from the UK Research Assessment Exercises in 1996, 2001 and 2008, we find...

We document the level, type, and severity of crime in rural Bangladesh. Crime affected 36% of the households. The average cost of crime was worth two weeks' household consumption. We then study how microcredit affects crime. Our theoretical model shows how microcredit may increase cost of crime...