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In a World with Many Targets, One-Dimensional Target Indicators Will Always Be Bypassed

It is striking that economists in particular firmly believe in the benefits of rule-binding, even though this belief runs counter to the standard assumption of economic theory that we humans are self-interested and therefore extremely resourceful when it comes to circumventing inconvenient government regulations, e.g. taxes. In Public Choice Theory, politicians are even assumed to have nothing but ...

In an Imperfect World Policy Rules Cannot be Perfect Either: Letter

It is striking that economists in particular firmly believe in the benefits of rule-binding, even though this belief runs counter to the standard assumption of economic theory that we humans are self-interested and therefore extremely resourceful when it comes to circumventing inconvenient government regulations, e.g. taxes. In Public Choice Theory, politicians are even assumed to have nothing but ...

The Pricing Structure of Legal Services: Do Lawyers Offer What Clients Want?

We analyze clients’ contract choices in auctions where Dutch law firms compete for standard cases such as labor disputes for individuals and collecting debts for businesses. In the auctions, lawyers can submit bids with any fee arrangement they prefer, including an hourly rate, a fixed fee, and a ‘mixed fee’: a time-capped fixed fee plus an hourly rate for any additional hours should the case take ...

The Effect of Mergers on Variety in Grocery Retailing

We study a merger between two Dutch supermarket chains to assess its effect on the depth as well as composition of assortment. We adopt a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits local variation in pre-merger competitive conditions and thus in the merger outcomes. To define our control group, we account for selection on observables through a matching procedure. We observe that, after the merger, ...

The Role of Budget Constraints in Sequential Elimination Tournaments

We study how budget constraints affect effort provision in sequential elimination tournaments. Our main result is that the introduction of budget constraints has two opposing effects on the initial effort of the unconstrained contestants, and leads to a non-monotonicity of this effort. This implies that if the budget asymmetry is not too large, total first-stage effort from unconstrained contestants ...

Assessing EU Merger Control through Compensating Efficiencies

Worldwide, the overwhelming majority of large horizontal mergers are cleared by antitrust authorities unconditionally. The presumption seems to be that efficiencies from these mergers are sizeable. We calculate the compensating efficiencies that would prevent a merger from harming consumers for 1,014 mergers affecting 12,325 antitrust markets scrutinized by the European Commission between 1990 and ...

Die EU Sustainable-Finance-Strategie: Implikationen für die künftige Bundesregierung

Die überarbeitete Sustainable-Finance-Strategie der EU bestätigt die wichtige Rolle der Finanzbranche für die Nachhaltigkeitstransition der Wirtschaft, konkretisiert sie jedoch nicht ausreichend. Viele der Maßnahmen sind begrüßenswert, oft mangelt es jedoch an Dringlichkeit und Dynamik. Die Strategie sollte stärker in das gesamtwirtschaftliche regulatorische Umfeld eingeordnet werden, um das Zusammenwirken ...

Hospital Mergers Can Impact the Offer of Health Care Services

In the last decades, many European hospital markets witnessed a wave of mergers leading to increased levels of market concentration. The effects of hospital mergers and the effectiveness of competition enforcement have been discussed by politicians but understudied by academics. This report studies how hospital mergers impact hospital service provision by focusing on the French hospital industry from ...

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