Essays in competition policy, innovation and banking regulation

Competition;Commercial policy;Technological innovations--Economic aspects;Banking law--Economic aspects

Seifert, Jacob ; Ulph, David Tregear ; Ulph, David Tregear

University:University of St Andrews

Department:Economics & Finance (School of)

关键词: Competition;    Commercial policy;    Technological innovations--Economic aspects;    Banking law--Economic aspects;   

Others  :  https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10023/9456/JacobSeifertPhDThesis.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y

来源: DR-NTU

【 摘 要 】

This thesis investigates the optimal enforcement of competition policy in innovativeindustries and in the banking sector. Chapter 2 analyses the welfare impactof compulsory licensing in the context of unilateral refusals to license intellectualproperty. When the risk-free rate is low, compulsory licensing is shown unambiguouslyto increase consumer surplus. Compulsory licensing has an ambiguouseffect on total welfare, but is more likely to increase total welfare in industriesthat are naturally less competitive. Compulsory licensing is also shown to be aneffective policy to protect competition per se. The chapter also demonstrates therobustness of these results to alternative settings of R&D competition.Chapter 3 develops a much more general framework for the study of optimalcompetition policy enforcement in innovative industries. A major contribution ofthis chapter is to separate carefully a firm's decision to innovate from its decision totake some generic anti-competitive action. This allows us to differentiate betweenfirms' counterfactual behaviour, according to whether or not they would haveinnovated in the absence of any potentially anti-competitive conduct. In contrastto the existing literature, it is shown that the stringency of optimal policy willbe harsher towards firms that have innovated in addition to taking a given anticompetitiveaction.Chapter 4 develops a framework for competition policy in the banking sector,which takes explicit account of capital regulation. In particular, conditions arederived under which increases in the capital requirement increase the incentives ofbanks to engage in a generic abuse of dominance in the loan market, and to exploitdepositors through the sale of ancillary financial products. Thus the central contributionof this chapter is to clarify the conditions under which stability-focusedcapital regulation conflicts with competition and consumer protection policy inthe banking sector.