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 ...
Eine Folge der Regenkatastrophe sind die immensen Kosten der Gebäudeschäden. Hier hilft eine Versicherungspflicht – die auch künftige Klimarisiken reduzieren kann. Der Klimawandel hat dieser Tage gezeigt, welche katastrophalen Folgen er hat: Sturmtief Bernd ist über Nordrhein-Westfalen, Rheinland-Pfalz, das Saarland und Teile Hessens gezogen und hat durch extremen Dauerregen ...
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, ...
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 ...
Innovation has recently come to the attention of Antitrust Authorities, even though the effect of mergers on innovation is still hotly debated. I study how the activity of Antitrust Authorities impacts future innovation of merging firms. Exploiting a change in notification rules I build an event study comparing mergers notified to the authorities with non-notified ones. I develop a new methodology...
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 ...
In den letzten Jahrzehnten kam es auf vielen europäischen Krankenhausmärkten zu einer Fusionswelle, die zu einer zunehmenden Marktkonzentration geführt hat. Die Auswirkungen von Krankenhausfusionen und die wirksame Durchsetzung von Wettbewerbsrecht wurden von der Politik diskutiert, aber wissenschaftlich nicht ausreichend beleuchtet. Im vorliegenden Bericht wird anhand des französischen Krankenhaussektors ...