In this paper, I study the effect of a change in the mandatory manufacturer rebate on wholesale prices for pharmaceuticals on competition by parallel imports. First, I analyze the effect of a manufacturer rebate on competition by parallel imports in a two-country model. An increase in the...

Globally, the regulation of P2P lending has evolved significantly in recent years, with mostly beneficial effects on the diversification of funding for individuals and corporations. Regulatory responses have varied greatly between countries, and the characteristics of the markets that have...

This open access Pivot demonstrates how a variety of technologies act as innovation catalysts within the banking and financial services sector. Traditional banks and financial services are under increasing competition from global IT companies such as Google, Apple, Amazon and PayPal whilst...

With Germany's nuclear phase-out, 23 reactors need to be dismantled in the near future. Initiated by the dire financial situation of the affected utilities in 2014, a major discourse on ensuring financial liability led to a redistribution of liabilities and finances, with the utilities remaining...

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure and services are necessary to spur economic growth especially in the digital age. The comparative advantage enjoyed by the Philippines in specific ICT and ICT-enabled services indicate the availability of competitive ICT to support...

This paper evaluates the rent control policy implemented in Germany in 2015. Like many countries around the world, German cities and metropolitan areas have experienced a strong increase in rental prices during the last decade. In response, the politicians aimed to dampen the rise in rental...

We examine the global legal entity identifier (LEI) system for the identification of participants in financial markets. Semi-structured interviews with data professionals revealed the many ways in which the LEI can improve both business process efficiency, and counterparty and credit risk...

The global increase in the regulation of banks has encouraged the channeling of investment funds into less regulated institutions such as shadow banks to avoid restriction. Shadow banks are institutions that operate outside the regulatory framework of the traditional banking system and because...

This paper evaluates the rent control policy implemented in Germany in 2015. Like many countries around the world, German cities and metropolitan areas have experienced a strong increase in rental prices during the last decade. In response, the politicians aimed to dampen the rise in rental...

This policy letter provides evidence for the crucial importance of the initial regulatory treatment for the further development of financial innovations by exploring the emergence and initial legal framing of off-balance-sheet leasing in Germany. Due to a missing legal framework, lease contracts...

Financial inclusion has significantly advanced in Armenia during the last decade. Rural and urban areas, however, have benefited unevenly. The high cost of providing financial services, the lack of physical infrastructure, higher poverty rates, and the low level of financial literacy are the...

We study the effect of board governance in state-owned and private banks by undertaking a study of commercial banks in India that has both bank groups. Covering a ten-year period from 2003 to 2012 that witnessed a large number of governance reforms in India, the results of our empirical analysis...

Previous studies on the value of terroir, or more generally geographical indications (GI), used hedonic techniques. We use historical data and exploit temporal and geographical variations in the introduction of wine GIs in early twentieth century France to study the impact on the price of...

"Prices versus quantities" (Weitzman 1974), a hugely influential paper, is widely cited (and taught) in current debates about the best policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The paper's criterion for ranking policies suggests that technological uncertainty favors taxes over cap and trade....

Environmental regulations such as air quality standards can lead to notable improvements in ambient air quality and to related health benefits. But they impose additional production costs on firms and may reduce productivity, earnings, and employment, especially in sectors exposed to trade and...

Unfavorable news are often delivered under the disguise of vagueness. But are people sufficiently naive to be fooled by such positive spin? We use a theoretical model and a laboratory experiment to study the strategic use of vagueness in a voluntary disclosure game. Consider a sender who aims at...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), as well as combinations thereof, are widely applied in incentive regulation practice, where the assessment of efficiency plays a major role in regulation design and benchmarking. Using a Monte Carlo simulation experiment,...

Economists have shown that international trade increases economic growth, with trade liberalization and integration having characterized the last 50 years. While trade can increase national welfare, recent estimates from both developed and developing countries show that labor market adjustment...

Broadband internet expansion is a topic of widespread discussion in Germany right now. But the country still has not met its own targets. Almost 100 percent of households are supplied with broadband connections with up to six megabits per second, yet Germany has lots of room to catch up when it...

We study the effects of regulatory oversight by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on credit supply as well as bank risk-taking, growth, and operating costs. We use a difference-in-differences approach, making use of the fact that banks below a $10 billion size cutoff are exempt...

This paper provides robust estimates of the impact of both product and labour market regulations on unemployment using data for 24 European countries over the period 1998-2013. Controlling for country-fixed effects, endogeneity and a large set of covariates, results show that product market...

The UK’s withdrawal from the EU will have far-reaching consequences on the European economy. However, the ultimate consequences of Brexit, especially for financial markets, depend on the final agreement, which is still under negotiation. Currently, regulated financial services can be provided...

Land prices across administrative boundaries can be useful for estimating the causal effects of local policy. Market anticipation about potential boundary changes can confound identification, so studies often avoid markets where this may arise. We develop an approach to quantify anticipation by...

An important goal of the European Commission is the promotion of the internal energy market (here specifically electricity), which requires sufficient and adequate cross-border interconnector capacity. However, cross-border interconnector capacity is scarce and, more importantly, the progress of...

Economics as a discipline is currently in disarray. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, academic experts, students, commentators, practitioners and politicians all questioned the status of academic economics and many called for a 'new economic thinking'. Nearly a decade later,...

This paper estimates and quantifies the impact of structural reforms on per capita income for a large set of OECD and non-OECD countries. The findings suggest that the quality of institutions matters to a large extent for economic outcomes. More competition-friendly regulations, as measured by...

This paper examines the drivers of the retrenchment in cross-border banking in the European Union (EU) since the global financial crisis, which stands out in international comparison as banks located in the euro area and in the rest of the EU reduced their cross-border claims by around 25%....

While the debate about the needs and merits of cryptocurrency regulation is ongoing, the unprecedented price hikes of cryptocurrencies towards the end of 2017 triggered a somewhat unexpected sort of regulation in the form of public statements by governments and financial supervisors. It kicked...

Zero rating and sponsored data have recently been introduced as new tariff options in mobile telecommunications markets. Both practices exempt data traffic of specific Internet services from an Internet user's download limit and thus allow for unlimited consumption of the respective content....

The excessive cost of financial intermediation in the Sub-Saharan African banking sectors motivates the investigation of whether competition, regulation and stability matter for efficiency in the banking system. Data from 440 commercial banks for the periods 2006–2015 were collected and...

Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, as well as Twitter – the FANG companies – have transformed society with both positive and negative effects. Soaring consumer access to information, news, social networks, and entertainment has been stimulated by the ever-more ubiquitous and falling...

This paper investigates the factors that determine capital structures of financial firms using two separate samples of banks and insurance companies and draws comparisons therefrom. It utilizes two samples of 16 South African banks and 26 South African insurance companies for the period...

There can be no doubt that the FANG companies – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, as well as Twitter – have transformed society since their emergence. Like all social transformations, the changes wrought by their services have had ripple effects that are both positive and negative. On...

Which markets do institutions use to change exposure to credit risk? Using a unique data set of transactions in corporate bonds and credit default swaps (CDS) by large financial institutions, we show that simultaneous transactions in both markets are rare, with an average institution having an...

Building on the 2017 Hamburg Statement and the G20 Roadmap for Digitalization, this paper recommends a G20 framework for artificial intelligence in the workplace. It proposes high level principles for such a framework for G-20 governments to enable the smoother, internationally broader and more...

Based on a yearly census of Indonesian manufacturing firms for 2000-2014, we investigate the effects of a sector-specific investment policy reform on firm productivity. Hereby we exploit a protectionist foreign direct investment reform (the so-called negative investment list) that designated...

This paper has explored the stringency of land-use regulation in US cities, focusing on building heights. Substantial stringency is present when regulated heights are far below free-market heights, while stringency is lower when the two values are closer. Using FAR as a height index, theory...

Adding to the literature on factors driving corruption and bribery, this paper examines the effect of contestability in business operations on bribe solicitations. Contestability undermines bureaucratic rent-seeking potential and this paper tries to capture this empirically using cross-country...

This paper examines the impact of volatility-based fund classification on portfolio performance. Using historical data on equity indices, we find that a strategy based on long-term portfolio volatility, as is imposed by the Synthetic Risk Reward Indicator (SRRI), yields better Sharpe Ratios (SR)...

This paper illustrates how the work of the WTO's standing committees is fuelling regulatory cooperation between WTO members, and inspiring RTA negotiators. We explore, as a case study, how the WTO TBT Committee has shaped provisions on international standards in RTAs, and focus on the extent to...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is often used by regulators to create a pseudo-competitive environment for sectors with natural monopolies. In addition to develop a theoretically well-behaved model, regulators need to take into account several other factors, such as the political agenda and the...

Entrepreneurship plays a pivotal role for institutional change and economic development in transition and developing economies. Formal and informal institutions in such countries are often sub-par, but rather than being constrained by them, entrepreneurship can often affect institutions and...

In the absence of a global carbon price, many individual countries set up policies to incentivize specific abatement interventions. In turn, minimizing compliance cost requires policy-makers to identify interventions that are worth pursuing. With this in mind, the objective of this paper is to...

This paper studies the mid-September 2019 stress in U.S. money markets: On September 16 and 17, unsecured and secured funding rates spiked up and, on September 17, the effective federal funds rate broke the ceiling of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) target range. We highlight two...

Estudiamos la evolución reciente de la prestación y regulación de servicios de infraestructura en Argentina. Nos concentramos tras un análisis global del proceso, en cuatro servicios domiciliarios: electricidad, gas natural de red, telecomunicaciones y agua y saneamiento. Mostramos los...