Concerns about market power and competition in the agri-food sector are widespread, with commentators regularly suggesting that farmers are in a structurally weaker position than other actors, who therefore benefit at their expense. The evidence reviewed in this paper indicates that downstream...

This report assesses the impact of digitalisation on competition by examining the evolution of mark-ups and multifactor productivity (MFP) across firms of different sizes. It finds that size is positively related to mark-ups and that this relationship has strengthened over time. This trend has...

Regulations of product markets serve legitimate objectives but, when ill-designed, can impose unnecessary restrictions on competition, and therefore on business dynamism, productivity and ultimately well-being. A recent update of the OECD’s Product Market Regulation indicator for Costa Rica...

Digital markets have raised a number of new competition challenges. Ex-post competition policy appears not to be able to address them in their entirety and with the necessary speed. There is considerable consensus, among academics and policy-makers, that ex-ante regulatory policies are needed to...

Poland’s productivity has grown strongly over the past decade, and efforts to reduce the regulatory burden have been significant. Despite impressive progress, product market regulation remains more burdensome than in most OECD countries, partly due to the importance of red tape and the level...

There is a widespread sense that over the last two decades firms have been decentralizing decisions to employees further down the managerial hierarchy. Economists have developed a range of theories to account for delegation, but there is less empirical evidence, especially across countries. This...

Health care markets fail to satisfy many requirements for perfect competition, including large numbers of consumers and firms, zero search costs, and marketability of all goods and services. Over time, health care markets have evolved to overcome the resulting inefficiencies. We combine the...

Switching costs and network effects bind customers to vendors if products are incompatible, locking customers or even markets in to early choices. Lock-in hinders customers from changing suppliers in response to (predictable or unpredictable) changes in efficiency, and gives vendors lucrative ex...

Tournaments are widely used in the economy to organize production and innovation. We study individual data on 2,775 contestants in 755 software algorithm development contests with random assignment. The performance response to added contestants varies non-monotonically across contestants of...

Using survey data from firms around the world I analyze how detection of bribery has impacted a firm's competitiveness over the past year. Managers report that the most significant impact was on employee morale, followed by business relations, and then reputation and regulatory relations. The...