Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade

https://link.springer.com/journal/10842

List of Papers (Total 57)

Assessing the Impact of Digital Trade on Enterprise Competitiveness: Evidence from Chinese A-Share Listed Companies

Digital trade is an advanced form of digital transformation in the field of trade. China has made significant strides in the realm of digital trade, particularly in the domain of cross-border e-commerce. It is worthwhile to consider whether the dividend of digital trade benefits enterprises and fosters new competitive advantages at the micro level. This study constructs a...

Committee Preferences and Information Acquisition

We study committees whose task is to make a binary decision where the correct decision depends on the state of the world that is imperfectly known. Committee members can exert effort to learn about the true state of the world, and their efforts are linked in a team production function. This allows to explore the externalities between the committee members’ efforts in the search...

May It Be a Little Bit More of Market Power? On Productivity Growth and Competition

In its heart, competition represents an important driver of productivity growth that has slowed in European countries since the financial crisis. This study examines the non-linear relationship between productivity growth and market power, using data on Central European manufacturing firms, from 2009 to 2017. The results show concave relationships between both variables, and that...

Backward Partial Vertical Integration Through Private Placement

We analyze the market impact of a partial vertical integration whereby a subset of retail firms acquire, through a private placement operation, a non-controlling stake in the capital of an upstream firm, which supplies an essential input. In addition, we assume that this upstream firm can price discriminate between the retail firms which (now) own a stake in its capital and all...

Should Private Exchanges of List Price Information Be Presumed to Be Anticompetitive?

Harrington (2022) provides a novel theory that explains how a private information exchange involving gross list prices can lead to higher transaction prices. On this basis, he considers that private list price exchanges between competitors should be presumed to harm competition. The theory, which has received much attention in the context of the EU trucks cartel case, was...

The Oligopolistic Behavior of Kazakh and Russian Wheat Exporters in the South Caucasus: Evidence from a Residual Demand Elasticity Analysis

This study looks at whether Kazakh and Russian wheat exporters leverage their dominant share of the wheat markets in the South Caucasus to exercise market power. We apply a three-stage estimation for systems of simultaneous equations and Zellner’s seemingly unrelated regression to analyze residual demand elasticity. The results of both estimations provide empirical evidence of...

Price-Rising Competition: a Higher Market Price When a Monopoly Faces a Small Entrant

The UK retail electricity market revealed (i) the co-occurrence between a declining market concentration and an increasing price and (ii) price differentiation between incumbents and small suppliers. We construct an infinite sequential game in which a monopoly faces a small entrant and find an equilibrium where both players are not motivated to deviate. However, this equilibrium...

Global R&D Location Strategy of Multinational Enterprises: an Agent-Based Simulation Modeling Approach

The global research and development (R&D) location strategy of multinational enterprises (MNEs) is examined using agent-based simulation (ABS) modeling. This study focuses on the positioning strategy of MNEs to understand the impact of their R&D location strategy. In ABS modeling, agents search for knowledge owners or universities in the global host market using Hotelling’s...

Contract Incompleteness and the Boundaries of the Firm in Times of COVID-19

In this paper, we study the firm’s boundaries in times of COVID-19. Ownership and location decisions govern sourcing and shape firms’ boundaries. Adopting incomplete contracts theory/international economics perspective, we investigate the determinants of ownership and location decisions and explore COVID-19–induced changes in firms’ boundaries. Drawing on survey data from a...

Prevalence and Persistence of High-Growth Entrepreneurship: Which Institutions Matter Most?

Which institutions encourage high-growth entrepreneurship to emerge and to be sustained? Building on institutional theory, this study exploits a sample of 239,911 observations for micro, small, and medium–sized firms from Bulgaria during the period 2001–2010 and finds three types of effects: first, informal institutional constraints such as corruption significantly reduce both...

Why Abandon the Paradise? Stations’ Incentives to Reduce Gasoline Prices at First

The German petrol station market is characterized by strong intraday price cycles, which probably correspond to the well-known Edgeworth cycles. The prices go up strongly in the late evening or in the middle of the night, fall relatively heavily in the early morning, and then go up and down several times in the course of the day. Locally, the analysis is limited to the 26 petrol...

List Price Collusion

Firms sometimes collude by agreeing on increases in list prices. Yet, the efficacy of such list price collusion is subject to discussion as colluding firms might, in principle, deviate secretly from the elevated prices by granting their customers discounts. This article reviews cases of list price collusion in the USA and Europe, and it presents a theory of harm suggesting that a...

The Dynamics of Firm Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Ethiopian Manufacturing Sector 1996–2017

Despite the pile of literature on firm growth dynamics, studies that use large census data have been greatly rare for developing countries mainly due to a paucity of data. This study, however, relies on a deep analysis of complete microdata of Ethiopian manufacturing firms over a very long enough period (22 years). Hence, this study adds to the ongoing debates on the firm growth...

Effects of the European Monetary Union on High-Technology Exports

Our study estimates the effects of the European Monetary Union (EMU) on high-technology (HT) export and assesses the potential knowledge spillovers of such trade. Irrespective of the importance of the HT trade channel, none of the previous studies in the literature focus on the effects of a common currency on HT trade. Increasing trade in the HT sector may lead to more efficient...

Correction to: Flexible Ubers and Fixed Taxis: the Effect of Fuel Prices on Car Services

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10842-021-00359-3

How Do Firms Respond to Reduced Labor Costs? Evidence from the 2007 Swedish Payroll Tax Reform

One way for policymakers to reduce labor costs and stimulate the recruitment of marginalized groups of labor in a highly unionized economy is to lower payroll taxes. However, the efficiency of this policy instrument has been questioned, and previous evaluations have mostly found small employment effects for such reforms. We investigate the effects of a payroll tax cut in Sweden...

R&D Investments in Markets with Network Effects

We consider process R&D investments of firms in markets with network effects and incomplete product compatibility. Our results indicate that network effects increase the firms’ individual investments in R&D. The presence of network effects weakens the positive impact of R&D cooperation on firms’ R&D investments. Further, we show that R&D competition can bring socially optimal...

The Impact of Foreign Technology and Embodied R&D on Productivity in Internationally Oriented and High-Technology Industries in Egypt, 2006–2009

This paper investigates the domestic productivity and spillover effects of foreign technology and embodied R&D on Egyptian manufacturing industries, 2006 to 2009. It also analyses the heterogeneous sectoral effects of technology transfer by focusing specifically on the productivity effects on highly internationalized and technology-intensive industries. These are expected to have...

Publisher Correction: Social Responsibility in a Bilateral Monopoly with Downstream Convex Technology

The Publisher would like to correct the introduced formatting errors and presentation of the mathematical expressions found on page 12 of the pdf version.

Social Responsibility in a Bilateral Monopoly with Downstream Convex Technology

This paper shows that, in a bilateral monopoly with consumer-friendly social concerns, only the downstream firm is always incentivized to adopt corporate social responsibility (CSR) if it has decreasing returns to the input, leading to a Pareto-superior outcome in equilibrium. This occurrence differs from a standard linear bilateral monopoly in which, if the upstream (downstream...

Coping with Societal Challenges: Lessons for Innovation Policy Governance

Grand societal challenges, such as global warming, can only be adequately dealt with through wide-ranging changes in technology, production and consumption, and ways of life, that is, through innovation. Furthermore, change will involve a variety of sectors or parts of the economy and society, and these change processes must be sufficiently consistent in order to achieve the...