This paper examines the incentives of firms to invest in socially responsible product innovations. Our analysis connects the existence of socially responsible innovations to the presence of intrinsic and extrinsic social responsibility preferences. In addition to deriving economic value from the product, consumers have heterogeneous intrinsic needs to consume products that are socially responsi...

This article examines the political origins of antitrust enforcement in developing countries. I consider how the organization and political influence of business affects governments’ commitments to competition policy institutions. The analysis predicts cross-class coalitions with contending regulatory preferences. An alliance of incumbent producers and affiliated labor groups (“insiders”) oppos...

The Directorate General for Competition at the European Commission enforces competition law in the areas of antitrust, merger control, and state aids. This year's article provides first a general presentation of the role of the Chief Competition Economist's team and surveys the main achievements of the Directorate General for Competition over 2016/2017. The article then reviews the economic wor...

Over the past decades, governments have switched from a managerial to an entrepreneurial style of governance in the strengthening of certain places at the expense of others. This coevolved with an increase in inter-urban and inter-regional competition for resources, also called ‘policy competition’. The issue for regional governments is how they balance their wish to strengthen their economic s...

The Parsonian wisdom that social conflict has dissociating and disruptive effects guides the thinking of many students of economy. It leads them to believe that economic competition and cooperation are “polar opposites” and, consequently, competition between firms should hinder cooperation between them. I challenge the applicability of this intuitively appealing wisdom to economic life. My anal...

The UK Office of Fair Trading and Competition Commission have recently taken the position that the analysis of an industry’s profits can yield important information about how competitive it is. This approach is not used in the US and rarely in the EU. There are a number of good reasons for this. First, it is not true that, even in a long-run competitive equilibrium, firms will earn zero economi...

This study builds a multi-sectoral balance-of-payments-constrained growth model that incorporates structural heterogeneity between sectors and countries, such as differences in labor productivity, price competition, shares of exports and imports, and the quality of commodities. The model in the current paper generates more comprehensive results than those presented by Thirlwall (1979), Blecker ...

Scholars often assert that intra-state competition increases the ability of firms to extract tax abatements by playing local governments off of one another. We test this proposition using data on the more than 5,000 tax abatement agreements signed in Ohio between 1983 and 2004 under its enterprise zone program. We articulate a political economic model of tax abatement generosity that models the...

This paper compares Bertrand and Cournot equilibria in a differentiated duopoly with R6D (research and development) competition. It shows that Cournot competition induces more R6D effort than Bertrand competition. However, the price is lower and output is larger in Bertrand than in Cournot competition. Furthermore, the Bertrand equilibrium is more efficient than the Cournot equilibrium if eithe...

That greater product market competition has the potential to affect outcomes in labour and product markets is borne out by one of the key premises of standard economic theory which predicts that, all other things held constant, prices should be lower and efficiency enhanced by more competition. In this paper we test this notion by considering the relationship between product market competition ...