A horizontal merger is unlikely to be profitable unless it involves the large majority of firms in an industry. This well established result was developed by Salant et al (1983) in a closed economy setting. The present ...

Using the institutional set-up of the Norwegian cement industry, in particular its sharing rule, we are able to identify the workings of a cartel in some detail. We focus on the two problems that any cartel faces: deciding ...

Marginal indirect tax reform analysis evaluates for each commodity (group) the marginal welfare cost (MC) of increasing government revenue with 1 Euro by raising the indirect tax rate on that commodity. In this paper, ...

We derive optimal rules for paying hospitals for non-emergency care when providers choose quality and capacity, and patient demand is rationed by waiting time. Waiting for treatment is costly for patients, so that hospital ...

This paper compares marginal income tax rates for the maximin versus a welfarist criterion in the standard Mirleesian optimal income tax problem. It derives fairly mild conditions under which the former is higher than the ...

The purpose of this article is to investigate the optimal merger policy in the presence of deterrence as well as type I and type II errors. We derive the optimal number of merger investigations, both when the competition ...

This paper summarises a decade of research by the authors into the welfare economic foundations for agricultural policy. The main results are that the levels of support to agriculture in rich developed countries like ...

Technological innovations often formulate new market regimes and create incentives to abandon existing, less attractive ones. However, this decision depends not only on market forces, such as economic and technological ...

Workers can move across firms and take with them portable skills. This has an impact on how firms are organized and allocate tasks across workers. To reduce mobility, a profit maximizing firm may inefficiently allocate ...