Because ICT standard frequently incorporate patented inventions, standard setting organizations have designed intellectual property policies whereby the owners of such "standard essential patents" must commit ex ante to license them on fair reasonable and non-discriminatory terms to manufacturers of standard-compliant products. However, these commitments are vague and may not be sufficient to prevent patent hold-up in practice. In this paper, we develop a simple framework to analyze the consequence of ineffective FRAND commitments, and compare them with legally binding commitments on a royalty level or a royalty cap. We show that the cap is systematically preferred by the licensor, while it has ambiguous effects on consumers depending on the licensorís preferred alternative strategy.

When evaluating policy treatments that are persistent and endogenous, available instrumental variables often exhibit more variation over time than the treatment variable. This leads to a weak instrumental variable problem, resulting in high bias or uninformative confidence intervals. We propose two new estimation approachesthat strengthen the instrument. We derive their theoretical properties and show in Monte Carlo simulations that they outperform standard IV-estimators. We use our procedures to estimate the effect of public utility divestiture in the U.S. nuclear energy sector. Our results show that divestiture significantly increases production efficiency.

In countries with limited exhaustible natural resources, reducing imports of raw materials is increasingly viewed as a significant side benefit of waste recycling. Using a panel of 21 developed and developing countries from 1994-2008, we seek to measure the size of this benefit by estimating the impact of metal scrap recovery on imports of metallic raw materials. We deal with the endogeneity of metal recovery with exogenous country characteristics including population density, the level of education, and knowledge of environmental technologies. We also develop a strategy for controlling for the price volatility in raw material markets. We find that increasing metal recovery by 10% reduces imports of metallic raw materials by 3.3% in our base specification. This result confirms that waste policies that favor recycling may have a sizeable impact on the balance of trade

Payment platforms offerer intermediation services to consumers and merchants that interact on a product market. The merchantís bank (the acquirer) usually pays an interchange fee to the consumerís bank (the issuer) that impacts the allocation of the total transaction fee between consumers and merchants. This paper studies whether a monopolistic payment platform chooses an interchange fee that exceeds the socially optimal one when there is "double internalization". We refer to "double internalization" as a situation in which both consumers and merchants internalize a fraction of the other sideís net costs of transacting on the platform. We show that double internalization may occur when the interchange fee impacts consumers’ decisions on the product market and compare the profit-maximizing interchange fee to the welfare-maximizing one.

Cet article offre une synthése de la littérature récente sur les marchés de plates-formes. De nouvelles avancées ont permis de généraliser les modèles fondateurs de Rochet et Tirole (2003)et d’Armstrong (2006) et d’élargir les sujets de recherches à des questions diverses comme celle de la mesure du pouvoir de marché en présence d’externalités croisées, ou encore l’effet sur le surplus social des ventes liées. Ces résultats peuvent guider l’analyse menée par les régulateurs et les autorités de la concurrence vers de nouvelles conclusions.

This paper analyses the evolution of the bidding strategies of nuclear power plants on the Spanish day-ahead auction market, over the 11-year period from 2002 until December 2012. During that time the proportion of renewable energy especially wind andsolar power increased dramatically. At the outset the nuclear plants offered almost all their production at zero cost; by the end, several were offering about 5% of their production at about 91 europer MWh compared to the market ceiling price of 180.3 euro per MWh. This change in biddingstrategy effectively increased the average wholesale price of electricity, leading to an overall increase in the revenues to power sellers of about $200 million euros per year in 2010 -2012, compared to what it would have been had they offered all their production at zero-cost. These results have important policy implications for regulatory authorities.

This paper provides the first comparative analysis of nuclear reactor construction costs in France and the United States. Studying the cost of nuclear power has often been a challenge, owing to the lack of reliable data sources and heterogeneity between countries, as well as the long time horizon which requires controlling for input prices and structural changes. We build a simultaneous system of equations for overnight costs and construction time (lead-time) to control for endogeneity, using expected demand variation as an instrument. We argue that benefits from nuclear reactor program standardization can arise through short term coordination gains, when the diversity of nuclear reactors’ technologies under construction is low, or through long term benefits from learning spillovers from past reactor construction experience, if those spillovers are limited to similar reactors. We find that overnight construction costs benefit directly from learning spillovers but that these spillovers are only significant for nuclear models built by the same Architect-Engineer (A- E). In addition, we show that the standardization of nuclear reactors under construction has an indirect and positive effect on construction costs through a reduction in lead-time, the latter being one of the main drivers of construction costs. Conversely, we also explore the possibility of learning by searching and find that, contrary to other energy technologies, innovation leads to construction costs increases

Trois faits majeurs peuvent être observés aujourd’hui. D’abord la fragilité de l’industrie manufactu-rière en France et dans d’autres pays occidentaux. Ensuite, des débats nourris sur la transition énergétique, notamment en France, qui laissent envisager des scénarios susceptibles d’augmenter le coût de l’énergie. Enfin, le développement rapide de l’exploitation d’huiles et de gaz de schistes aux Etats-Unis, à l’origine d’une baisse importante du prix du gaz sur ce continent. Dans ce contexte, il est normal de s’interroger sur l’impact des prix de l’énergie et de ses variations sur la compétitivité de l’industrie française. Certaines données importantes pour aborder cette question sontparfois méconnues. Valorisant les résultats d’une thèse de doctorat sur ce sujet, ce document de travail vise à présenter sous une forme accessible les principaux résultats de la littérature économique et leurs conséquences. L’objectif est ici de donner quelques clés de compréhension des débats en cours et de proposer des informations susceptibles de stimuler la discussion sur cessujets difficiles, sans prétendre répondre aux nombreuses questions soulevées dans ces débats.

We investigate how public bureaucrats influence outcomes in regulated markets when they resolve price disputes. It has previously been demonstrated that regulators cause biased outcomes when they have short office terms, i.e. when they have relatively strong career concerns (Leaver, 2009). This paper extends previous studies to the situation when bureaucrats have life tenure and therefore have relatively weaker career concerns. We posit that potential career concerns are negatively related to experience in that experienced regulators develop stronger concerns for consumers. This suggests that the regulator’s motivation matter for regulatory decisions but that motivation might change as regulators become more experienced. We also posit that regulators’ behaviour is influenced by case complexity, which affects how much effort that have to put in towards a regulatory decision. Our theoretical model predicts that regulators set lower prices when cases are less complex and that those prices are confirmed when appealed to the court. For more complex cases, the court reduces the regulator’s price when she is only concerned about her career and the court increases the regulator’s price when she cares about both her career and consumer surplus. All these predictions are confirmed empirically when using data on 489 disputes from the Swedish electricity market.