regulatory reform in britain regulatory reform in britain john kay and john vickers major sectors of the british economy are currently undergoing far reaching regulatory reform deregulation removal of barriers to competition and the introduction of new methods of regulation are occurring notably in financial services some of the professions and in utility industries such as telecommunications gas and electricity this paper gives an economic assessment of these developments the authors examine the root causes of market failure that call for regulation externalities monopoly and information problems and the pros and cons of various regulatory responses a broad distinction is drawn between structural regulation the determination of which firms or types of firms can engage in which activities and conduct regulation the control of how firms behave in their chosen activities recent examples of deregulation plus re regulation in britain are seen in part as a shift from structural to conduct regulation the relative merits of the two modes of regulation are complex to assess but it is argued that some recent regulatory reforms are placing undue reliance on conduct regulation as well as assessing individual industries the authors draw general conclusions about the desirability of regulatory solutions that make full use of market forces

linking permit markets multilaterally we formally study the determinants magnitude and distribution of efficiency gains generated in multilateral linkages between permit markets we provide two novel decomposition results for these gains characterize individual preferences over linking groups and show that our results are largely unaltered with strategic domestic emissions cap selection or when banking and borrowing are allowed using the paris agreement pledges and power sector emissions data of five countries which all use or considered using both emissions trading and linking we quantify the efficiency gains we find that the computed gains can be sizable and are split roughly equally between effort and risk sharing

nonmonetary effects of the financial crisis in propagation of the great depression this paper examines the effects of the financial crisis of the 1930s onthe path of aggregate output during that period our approach is complementary to that of friedman and schwartz who emphasized the monetary impact of the bank failures we focus on non monetary primarily credit related aspects of the financial sector output link and consider the problems of debtors as well as those of the banking system we argue that the financial disruptions of 1930 33 reduced the efficiency of the credit allocation process and that the resulting higher cost and reduced availability of credit acted to depress aggregate demand evidence suggests that effects of this type can help explain the unusual length and depth of the great depression this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policy responses to twin crises we study how effective fiscal and monetary policy responses are during a twin crisis using the dataset provided by laeven and valencia 2008 we identify 57 episodes of twin crises following the methods proposed in baldacci et al 2009 and hutchison et al 2010 we construct the variables measuring the duration and output cost of a twin crisis we find that fiscal policy does not seem to be associated with the shortening of a twin crisis regarding monetary policy we find that monetary tightening is associated with the lengthening of a twin crisis duration consistent with the result in hutchison et al 2010 dealing with a sudden stop crisis in addition our results show that while a mild monetary expansion is effective in reducing a twin crisis duration over expansionary monetary policy loses its effectiveness

price and network dynamics in the european carbon market this paper presents an analysis of the european emission trading system as a transaction network it is shown that given the lack of a centralized market place industrial actors had to resort to local connections and financial intermediaries to participate in the market this gave rise to a hierarchical structure in the transaction network to empirically relate networks statistics to market outcomes a pls pm modeling technique is introduced it is shown that the asymmetries in the network induced market inefficiencies e g increased bid ask spread albeit the efficiency of the market has improved from the beginning of phase ii the asymmetry persists imposing unnecessary additional costs on agents and reducing the effectiveness of the market as a mitigation instrument

guarantees transparency and the interdependency between sovereign and bank default risk bank debt guarantees have traditionally been viewed as costless measures to prevent bank runs however as recent experiences in some european countries have demonstrated guarantees may link the coordination problems of bank and sovereign creditors and induce a functional interdependence between the likelihoods of a government default and bank illiquidity employing a global game approach we model this link showing the existence and uniqueness of the joint equilibrium and derive its comparative statics properties in equilibrium the guarantee reduces the probability of a bank run while it increases the probability of a sovereign default the latter erodes the guarantee s credibility and thus its effectiveness ex ante by setting the guarantee optimally the government balances these two effects in order to minimize expected costs of crises our results show that the optimal guarantee has clear cut welfare gains which are enhanced through policies that promote greater balance sheet transparency

competition privatisation and productive efficiency evidence from the airline industry we use data from the airline industry to examine the extent to which the costs of airline operations are affected by rents accruing to workers and the extent to which these rents depend inter alia upon the degree of competition in the industry our empirical results based on a panel of twelve european and seven major united states airlines confirm that state ownership substantially increases rents to labour while the effects of competition are more subtle and ambiguous airline profits tend to be associated with higher rents to employees the gains from further privatisation and liberalisation may be quite large does competition have significant effects on productive as well as allocative efficiency convincing empirical answers to this question have been hard to find for two reasons first data of the quality required for robust estimation of productive efficiency are only rarely available secondly there is frequently no convincing standard against which the efficiency of an industry or a firm may be compared since when the degree of competition varies many other things such as technology network structures and firm sizes typically vary as well these problems do not automatically make comparison impossible but they compound the need for high quality data one industry which is likely to be well suited to investigating questions of this kind is the international airline industry the industry contains a large number of firms thus ensuring at least enough potential competition to make questions about the effects of competition interesting but the scope for these firms to compete with one another has been influenced to varying degrees over the years by different national and international regulatory regimes in particular deregulation of the united states industry in 1978 provided a kind of natural experiment that has led not only to comparisons of the before and after variety but also to comparisons between the united states industry and that of other global regions notably europe such comparisons are far from straightforward but they are facilitated by the fact that the technology of civil aviation is more or less internationally standardised and by the relatively high quality of available data in the industry

dynamic evolution characteristics of european union emissions trade system price from high price period to low price period abstract carbon market is a valid measure for promoting green and low carbon development and price is the core of market mechanism in this work combining directed limited penetrable visibility graph and coarse graining method a new method is proposed to identify the potential periods and dynamic evolution characteristics of carbon price which opens up a new perspective for government and investors to understand evolution characteristics and prevent risks at the same time a empirical analysis is conducted based on eu ets daily price from september 29 2009 to september 29 2017 and the dynamic fluctuation characteristics of carbon price from high price period to low price period are obtained

regulation in the european community all governments regulate economic activity in their own countries the single european market will involve a significant transfer of regulatory activity from member states to the european community as well as the initiation of regulatory activity in certain areas that have not previously been subject to regulation at all including the activities of member states themselves as in taxation or the provision of subsidies to industry why should governments wish to make such a transfer of powers what do they have to gain

post mortem examination of the international financial network abstract as the recent crisis has forcefully suggested understanding financial market interconnectedness is of a paramount importance to explain systemic risk stability and economic dynamics in this paper we address these issues along two related perspectives first we explore the statistical properties of the international financial network ifn defined as a weighted directed graph where nodes are countries and links represent debtor creditor relationships in equities and short long run debt we investigate whether the 2008 financial crisis has resulted in a significant change in the topological properties of the ifn our findings suggest that the crisis caused not only a reduction in the amount of securities traded but also induced changes in the topology of the network and in the time evolution of its statistical properties this has happened however without changing the disassortative core periphery structure of the ifn architecture second we perform an econometric study to examine the ability of network based measures to explain cross country differences in crisis intensity we investigate whether the conclusion of previous studies showing that international connectedness is not a relevant predictor of crisis intensity may be reversed once one explicitly accounts for the position of each country within the ifn we show that higher interconnectedness reduces the severity of the crisis as it allows adverse shocks to dissipate quicker however being central in the network may make countries that are not members of a rich club more vulnerable in times of crisis finally we find strong evidence of nonlinear effects once the high degree of heterogeneity that characterizes the ifn is taken into account

deregulating european airlines deregulating european airlines francis mcgowan and paul seabright one of the industries with the greatest potential to benefit from the single european market is civil aviation which has been highly regulated by european governments the deregulation of civil aviation in the us since the late 1970s has provided valuable evidence about the nature of the airline industry and its response to the liberalization of conditions of entry by new carriers we examine the us experience and look at the changing regulatory framework for the european industry we also consider the main sources of market failure in air transport the lessons of the us experience are threefold first deregulation can in principle produce major gains to consumers without damaging the long run profitability of carriers by reducing the high costs of operation of european airlines second congestion problems especially the availability of landing slots at airports need to be managed effectively to prevent incumbent carriers squeezing out new entrants we recommend a system of slot auctions to achieve this third in spite of relatively low sunk costs of entry to the industry there remain significant opportunities for the exercise of market power by incumbent carriers deregulation of entry needs therefore to be supplemented by a vigorous competition policy especially with regard to the approval of mergers

srisk a conditional capital shortfall measure of systemic risk we introduce srisk to measure the systemic risk contribution of a financial firm srisk measures the capital shortfall of a firm conditional on a severe market decline and is a function of its size leverage and risk we use the measure to study top financial institutions in the recent financial crisis srisk delivers useful rankings of systemic institutions at various stages of the crisis and identifies fannie mae freddie mac morgan stanley bear stearns and lehman brothers as top contributors as early as 2005 q1 moreover aggregate srisk provides early warning signals of distress in indicators of real activity received june 7 2011 accepted april 18 2016 by editor geert bekaert

rent sharing in the european airline industry abstract to the extent that product market competition affects managerial incentives to control costs price cost margins offer a poor guide to the evaluation of market power we propose a method to evaluate simultaneously both market power and its pass through on cost we focus on rent sharing between unions and management as a mechanism through which costs are endogenised we develop and estimate a structural model of competition where wages are endogenously determined in the first stage with a price setting market game following in the second stage this structural model is then estimated using data for 8 european airlines from 1976 1990 we find a strong support for the hypothesis that lax competition induces extensive rent sharing through excessive wages

what s different about banks abstract negotiable certificates of deposit cd s trade in the capital market in competition with other securities like commercial paper and bankers acceptances if cd s must pay lenders competitive monetary interest the reserve tax on cd s is borne by bank borrowers viability of the tax means there must be something special about bank loans that makes some borrowers willing to pay higher interest rates than those on other securities of equivalent risk moreover there must be something special about banks that prevents other intermediaries from competing to assure that it never pays to finance loans with cd s

the evolution of u s airline competition studies by academic economists were a significant force in the movement towards deregulation of the domestic airline industry in the early 1970s levine 1965 jordan 1970 keeler 1972 douglas and miller 1974 during the critical 1977 78 period in which deregulation was imposed first de facto by the civil aeronautics board cab and then de jure by congress the chairman and vice chairman of the cab were economists for the 14 years since deregulation economists have continued intensive study of the industry in part because of the unusual availability of reliable firm and transaction level data and in part because of the rare opportunity to observe an industry as it evolves from strict economic regulation to fairly unimpeded competition and strategic behavior the simplest prediction of economists about airline deregulation and one of the few on which nearly all economists agreed was that deregulation would improve consumer welfare in comparison to continued price and entry regulation fourteen years later nearly all economists still agree on this though the degree of enthusiasm for the deregulation outcome varies considerably there was substantial disagreement among economists about the market structure that would result because studies of scale economies in the airline industry had concluded that none existed beyond the scale of the smaller major airlines of the 1970s caves 1962 eads et al 1969 many economists argued that deregulation would result in more than the 11 major airlines that existed at the time of deregulation others predicted that only a few or possibly only one airline would survive at a large scale two noted university of chicago economists sam peltzman and lester telser made a bet in 1979 on whether

who pays for bank insolvency this paper discusses proposals for handling bank failures in a manner that is rapid enough to allow the business to continue respects the ranking of claims makes none of the parties worse off than under traditional insolvency and does not require taxpayer funds except to guarantee the new organization until recapitalization it considers the relationship between the regime for bank exit and the rest of the framework for regulation and supervision the role of market discipline in enabling solutions before the point of insolvency is reached the problems in assessing the costs of different exit regimes and public intervention

u s airline deregulation its effects on passengers capital and labor his paper presents an analysis of the effects of airline deregulation on passengers business and personal first class and coach and explores how capital and labor have fared in a free market the evidence corroborates many benefits that proponents of deregulation predicted but it has not worked perfectly prices are not fully competitive and for certain dimensions service quality is down furthermore the contestability hypothesis as applied to the airline industry does not withstand statistical examination

on the stochastic properties of carbon futures prices pricing carbon is a central concern in environmental economics due to the worldwide importance of emissions trading schemes to regulate pollution this paper documents the presence of small and large jumps in the stochastic process of the co 2 futures price the large jumps have a discrete origin i e they can arise from various demand factors or institutional decisions on the tradable permits market contrary to the existing literature we show that the stochastic process of carbon futures prices does not contain a continuous component brownian motion the results are derived by using high frequency data in the activity signature function framework todorov and tauchen in j econom 154 125 138 2010 todorov and tauchen in j bus econ stat 29 356 371 2011 the implication is that the carbon futures price should be modeled as an appropriately sampled centered levy or poisson process the pure jump behavior of the carbon price might be explained by the lower volume of trades on this allowance market compared to other highly liquid financial markets

price formation on the marseille fish market evidence from a network analysis abstract the empirical analysis of fish markets always reveals strong price dispersion for homogeneous or very similar goods the problem is how to explain this price dispersion on a market where there is no evident arbitrage explanations proposed by different authors include differences in organization the characteristics of the good and the influences of social interactions between buyers and sellers in line with the last of these three approaches we consider the fish market of marseille as a seller seller network we start by examining the influence of market interactions through a static and then a dynamic econometric model we then analyze the role of the seller s position in the network we bring to light a surprising paradox in that the sellers who share the most buyers with competitors i e the most central sellers charge the highest prices

a network analysis of the italian overnight money market the objective of this paper is to analyse the network topology of the italian segment of the european overnight money market through methods of statistical mechanics applied to complex networks we investigate differences in the activities of banks of different sizes and the evolution of their connectivity structure over the maintenance period the main purpose of the analysis is to establish the potential implications of the current institutional arrangements on the stability of the banking system and to assess the efficiency of the interbank market in terms of absence of speculative and preferential trading relationships

price drivers and structural breaks in european carbon prices 2005 2007 this article aims at characterizing the daily price fundamentals of european union allowances euas traded since 2005 as part of the emissions trading scheme ets the presence of two structural changes on april 2006 following the disclosure of 2005 verified emissions and on october 2006 following the european commission announcement of stricter phase ii allocation allows to isolate distinct fundamentals evolving overtime the results extend previous literature by showing that eua spot prices react not only to energy prices with forecast errors but also to unanticipated temperatures changes during colder events besides the sub period decomposition of the pilot phase gives a better grasp of institutional and market events that drive allowance price changes

financial intermediation and delegated monitoring this paper develops a theory of financial intermediation based on minimizing the cost of monitoring information which is useful for resolving incentive problems between borrowers and lenders it presents a characterization of the costs of providing incentives for delegated monitoring by a financial intermediary diversification within an intermediary serves to reduce these costs even in a risk neutral economy the paper presents some more general analysis of the effect of diversification on resolving incentive problems in the environment assumed in the model debt contracts with costly bankruptcy are shown to be optimal the analysis has implications for the portfolio structure and capital structure of intermediaries

market efficiency in the european carbon markets in this paper we study the relationship between futures and spot prices in the european carbon markets from the cost of carry hypothesis the aim is to investigate the extent of efficiency market the three main european markets bluenext eex and ecx are analyzed during phase ii covering the period from march 13 2009 to january 17 2012 futures contracts are found to be cointegrated with spot prices and interest rates for several maturities in the three co2 markets results are similar when structural breaks are taken into account according to individual and joint tests the cost of carry model is rejected for all maturities and co2 markets implying that neither contract is priced according to the cost of carry model the absence of the cost of carry relationship can be interpreted as an indicator of market inefficiency and may bring arbitrage opportunities in the co2 market

allowance price drivers in the first phase of the eu ets abstract in the first phase of the eu emissions trading scheme eu ets the price per ton of co 2 initially rose to over 30 the price then collapsed to essentially zero by mid 2007 by deriving a structural model of the allowance price under the assumption of efficient markets i examine the extent to which this variation in price can be explained by marginal abatement costs i then gradually relax the model by allowing for delayed adjustment of price to fundamentals as well as by introducing lagged lhs variables the pattern of results suggests that while prices were not initially driven by marginal abatement costs this inefficiency was largely corrected after the accounting of 2005 emissions in april 2006

financial crises in asia and latin america then and now in this paper we analyze the extent to which past financial crises share common characteristics in latin america asia europe and the middle east we examine the recent crises in asia and in latin america in particular their severity to assess whether the considerable historical differences that we have documented for the earlier sample have eroded we conclude that in a deregulated world the well behaved asian financia1 crises are a relic of the past

transaction costs and tradeable permits abstract tradeable permit systems are at the center of current interest and activity in market based reforms of environmental policy because these systems can offer significant advantages over conventional approaches to pollution control unfortunately claims made for their relative cost effectiveness have often been exaggerated transaction costs which may be significant in these markets reduce trading levels and increase abatement costs in some cases equilibrium permit allocations and hence aggregate control costs are sensitive to initial permit distributions providing an efficiency justification for politicians typical focus on initial allocations

costs of banking system instability some empirical evidence abstract this paper assesses the cross country stylised facts on empirical measures of the losses incurred during periods of banking crises we first consider the direct resolution costs to the government and then the broader costs to the welfare of the economy proxied by losses in gdp we find that the cumulative output losses incurred during crisis periods are large roughly 15 20 on average of annual gdp in contrast to previous research we also find that output losses incurred during crises in developed countries are as high or higher on average than those in emerging market economies moreover output losses during crisis periods in developed countries also appear to be significantly larger 10 15 than in neighbouring countries that did not at the time experience severe banking problems in emerging market economies by contrast banking crises appear to be costly only when accompanied by a currency crisis these results seem robust to allowing for macroeconomic conditions at the outset of crisis in particular low and declining output growth that have also contributed to future output losses during crises episodes

causes of the eu ets price drop recession cdm renewable policies or a bit of everything new evidence the price of eu allowances euas in the eu emissions trading scheme eu ets fell from almost 30 tco2 in mid 2008 to less than 5 tco2 in mid 2013 the sharp and persistent price decline has sparked intense debates both in academia and among policy makers about the decisive allowance price drivers in this paper we examine whether and to what extent the eua price drop can be justified by three commonly identified explanatory factors the economic recession renewable policies and the use of international credits capitalizing on marginal abatement cost theory and a broadly extended data set we find that only variations in economic activity and the growth of wind and solar electricity production are robustly explaining eua price dynamics contrary to simulation based analyses our results point to moderate interaction effects between the overlapping eu ets and renewable policies the bottom line however is that 90 of the variations of eua price changes remains unexplained by the abatement related fundamentals together our findings do not support the widely held view that negative demand shocks are the main cause of the weak carbon price signal in view of the new evidence we evaluate the eu ets reform options which are currently discussed

carbon price drivers phase i versus phase ii equilibrium abstract the aim of this paper is to investigate the determinants of the carbon price during the two phases of the european union emission trading scheme eu ets more specifically relying on daily eu allowance futures contracts we test whether the carbon price drivers identified for phase i still hold for phase ii and evolve toward a long run relationship using cointegration techniques and accounting for the 2006 structural break in the carbon market we show that while a cointegrating relationship exists for both phases of the eu ets the nature of this equilibrium relationship is different across the two subperiods with an increasing role of fundamentals in phase ii deriving equilibrium values we show that the carbon price tends to be undervalued since the end of 2009

liaisons dangereuses increasing connectivity risk sharing and systemic risk the recent financial crisis poses the challenge to understand how systemic risk arises endogenously and what architecture can make the financial system more resilient to global crises this paper shows that a financial network can be most resilient for intermediate levels of risk diversification and not when this is maximal as generally thought so far this finding holds in the presence of the financial accelerator i e when negative variations in the financial robustness of an agent tend to persist in time because they have adverse effects on the agent s subsequent performance through the reaction of the agent s counterparties 2012 elsevier b v all rights reserved

do banking crises improve democracy we study the relationship between banking crises and the level of democracy we use an event study method on a sample of up to 129 countries over the period 1975 2010 featuring 94 systemic banking crises we find that banking crises are followed by an improvement in democracy and report evidence suggesting that the relation may be causal the bulk of the improvement takes place between 3 and 10 years after the banking crisis the impact of a banking crisis is greater in non democratic countries and when the banking crisis is severe we explain this finding by the fact that banking crises create windows of opportunity to contest autocratic regimes

systemic risk and bank size abstract in this paper we analyse firm level systemic risk for us and european banks from 2004 to 2012 we observe that common systemic risk indicators are primarily driven by firm size which implies an overriding concern for too big to fail institutions however smaller banks may still pose considerable systemic threats as exemplified by the northern rock debacle in 2007 by introducing a simple standardisation we obtain new risk measures that often prove to be superior predictors of financial distress during the 2007 2009 subprime crisis we conclude that the new measures could be a valuable addition to the existing indicators employed in basel iii to identify systemically important banks

preemptive patenting and the persistence of monopoly this article takes a different tack and inquires whether institutions such as the patent system create opportunities for firms with monopoly power to maintain their monopoly power the results apply to other situations such as brand identification spatial location and capacity expansion which share the characteristic that early or preemptive actions may lower the returns to potential competitors

the fiscal cost implications of an accommodating approach to banking crises abstract in recent decades a majority of countries have experienced a systemic banking crisis requiring a major and expensive overhaul of their banking system budgetary outlays whether immediate or deferred have exceeded 50 of gdp in some cases this paper uses cross country econometric evidence to examine whether the design of crisis containment and resolution policies can systematically influence the overall magnitude of fiscal costs we find that accommodating policies such as blanket deposit guarantees open ended liquidity support repeated partial recapitalizations debtor bail outs and regulatory forbearance all tend to add significantly and sizably to fiscal costs

flexible inflation targeting and financial stability is it enough to stabilize inflation and output abstract we investigate empirically whether a central bank can promote financial stability by stabilizing inflation and output and whether additional stabilization of asset prices and credit growth would enhance financial stability in particular we employ an econometric model of the norwegian economy to investigate the performance of simple interest rate rules that allow a response to asset prices and credit growth in addition to inflation and output we find that output stabilization tends to improve financial stability additional stabilization of house prices equity prices and or credit growth enhances stability in both inflation and output but has mixed effects on financial stability in general financial stability as measured by e g asset price volatility improves while financial stability measured by indicators that depend directly on interest rates deteriorates mainly because of higher interest rate volatility owing to a more active monetary policy

risk neutral models for emission allowance prices and option valuation the existence of mandatory emission trading schemes in europe and the united states and the increased liquidity of trading on futures contracts on co2 emissions allowances led naturally to the next step in the development of these markets these futures contracts are now used as underliers for a vibrant derivative market in this paper we give a rigorous analysis of a simple risk neutral reduced form model for allowance futures prices demonstrate its calibration to historical data and show how to price european call options written on these contracts this paper was accepted by haitao li guest editor finance

effects of us interest rates and news on the daily interest rates of a highly indebted emerging economy evidence from turkey it has been widely demonstrated that asset prices react sensitively to macroeconomic news releases both in the industrialized countries and emerging markets however there are contradicting results on the effects of changes in interest rates of industrialized countries on asset prices of emerging markets in heavily indebted economies in addition to these factors political news and announcements from international institutions that may increase or decrease concerns about debt sustainability can affect asset prices as well this potential notwithstanding there has been relatively limited empirical work on the effects of such variables the objective of this study is to quantify the impact of all of these factors on interest rates of a highly indebted emerging economy using daily post crisis data of the turkish economy we show that both good and bad political news international monetary fund announcements and european union related news significantly affected secondary market government securities yi

the real effect of banking crises finance or asset allocation effects some international evidence abstract this paper analyzes whether the decline in economic growth that follows a banking crisis occurs because of a reduction in the amount of credit available finance effect or a worsening in the allocation of investable resources asset allocation effect we use a sample of more than 2500 industrial firms in 18 developed and developing countries that experienced 19 systemic banking crises between 1989 and 2007 the results indicate that banking crises negatively affect firms intangible investments which intensifies the economic downturn the negative growth effect produced by the worsening of the investment allocation is stronger in countries with highly developed financial systems and institutions

strategic complementarities and the twin crises the economic literature has emphasized the role of strategic complementarities in generating banking crises and currency crises motivated by evidence from recent financial crises we study a model where strategic complementarities exist not only within a group of creditors or within a group of currency speculators but also between the two groups the additional type of strategic complementarities generates a vicious cycle between banking crises and currency crises this vicious cycle magnifies the correlation between the two crises and destabilizes the economy we discuss some empirical implications and policy implications and in particular show that due to the interaction between the banking sector and the currency market a lender of last resort might not be able to prevent bank runs

toward a positive theory of international institutions regulating international aviation markets the regulation of postwar international aviation markets suggests that existing approaches to international institutions cannot adequately account for important elements of international institution building in particular scholars have neglected how domestic politics shapes the incentives of national governments to create and maintain international institutions and the impact of domestic politics on the scope and functions of international institutions drawing on positive theories of regulation and the literature on property rights i argue that national politicians use international institutions to increase the wealth available for domestic redistribution in short national politicians create and maintain international institutions to maximize domestic political support i present a domestic political model that explains how when and why national politicians create international institutions the model is applied to the creation of institutions governing international aviation markets in the late 1940s and the reformulation of these institutions over the past two decades

endogenous costs and price cost margins an application to the european airline industry this paper allows for endogenous costs in the estimation of price cost margins in particular we estimate price cost margins when firms bargain over wages we extent the standard two equation set up demand and first order condition in the product market to include a third equation which is derived from bargaining over wages in this way price cost margins are determined by wages and vice versa we implement the model using data for eight european airlines from 1976 1994 and show that the treatment of endogenous costs has important implications for the measurement of price cost margins and the assessment of market power our main result is that observed prices in europe are virtually identical to monopoly prices even though observed margins are consistent with nash behavior apparently costs had been inflated to the point that the european consumers were faced with a de facto monopoly prices

centrality and pricing in spatially differentiated markets the case of gasoline we highlight the importance of centrality for pricing firms characterized by a more central position in a spatial network are more powerful in terms of having a stronger impact on their competitors prices and on equilibrium prices these propositions are derived from a simple theoretical model and investigated empirically for the retail gasoline market of vienna austria we compute a measure of network centrality based on the locations of gasoline stations in the road network results from a spatial autoregressive model show that prices of gasoline stations are more strongly correlated with prices of central competitors

competition in european aviation pricing policy and market structure the purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of liberal bilateral agreements on some european air routes in terms of price competition and market structure the author proposes a model that explains firms behavior and shows that after the liberalization firms exploit their cost advantages and differentiate their products more but market structure still depends on access to airport facilities and other ancillary services controlled by the flag carriers these results differ from american evidence in that the author finds that the effect of airport presence on prices through lower costs more than offsets the effect through higher perceived quality copyright 1995 by blackwell publishing ltd