Common Market with Regulated Firms

Pierre-Philippe Combes, Bernard Caillaud and Bruno Jullien

Annals of Economics and Statistics, 1997, issue 47, 65-99

Abstract: We examine the effect of bilateral trade in a concentrated industry under Cournot competition, when firms are regulated by national agencies who care about national social welfare. We allow for differences in costs and market sizes and for asymmetric information between regulatory agencies and regulated firms. A national regulatory policy may or may not be publicly observed by foreign competitors. We show that it is optimal to allow states to subsidize their domestic firms: bilateral trade improves the allocative efficiency and reduces the agency costs of regulation. Strategic trade policy effects that appear when regulatory contracts are public are beneficial to both states and reduce incentive costs as well as allocative inefficiencies. Results extend to the case of segmented markets with export costs when states are allowed to use export subsidies as well as to regulate domestic production. They also extend under perfect information to an arbitrary number of states and regulated firms, to the existence of private importing firms and of a not too large export market.

Date: 1997
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20076083 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:adr:anecst:y:1997:i:47:p:65-99

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Laurent Linnemer

More articles in Annals of Economics and Statistics from GENES Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Secretariat General () and Laurent Linnemer ().