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This paper estimates how beer franchise laws and their interaction with restrictions on vertical integration between manufacturing and wholesaling impacted US craft brewers' entry and production decisions. The effects are identified by exploiting variation in policies across states and time between 1980 and 2016. I find that beer franchise laws significantly reduced craft brewery entry and growth, leading to lower levels of breweries and craft beer production. The effects are largest in states that place restrictions on brewery/wholesaler integration. The findings in this paper indicate that contract termination restrictions, which were legislated to protect wholesalers from upstream brewers, had the effect of encouraging opportunism from wholesalers and inhibited the growth of smaller firms in the industry.

Vier Parteien - Die Linke, SPD, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen und FDP - haben bis Ende April 2021 den Entwurf ihres Programms zur Bundestagswahl am 26. September veröffentlicht. Wie klar und überzeugend vermitteln Bundestagsparteien ihre Vorstellungen? Die digital- und medienpolitischen Aussagen der Entwürfe werden kritisch analysiert. ; By late April 2021, four parties have published their programme for the German federal parliamentary elections (Bundestag) in September 2021. This article provides a critical comparative review of digital and media policy messages presented in these programmes. The Greens cover current topics in the areas of public service and commercial media large online platform providers and infrastructure roll out for electronic communications both most comprehensively and most vaguely. The digital and media policy statements of the left, social democratic and free democratic parties stick more closely to the respective party's brand.

Die aktuellen wirtschaftspolitischen Debatten um den stockenden Ausbau einer flächendeckenden Glasfaserinfrastruktur und um die Versteigerung der 5G-Mobilfunkfrequenzen zeigen, dass die Regulierung von Telekommunikationsmärkten in Deutschland vor großen Herausforderungen steht. Im Kern entzünden sich die Konflikte an einer Abwägung zwischen dem zügigen Ausbau moderner Telekommunikationsnetze und einer flächendeckenden Verfügbarkeit von Telekommunikationsdienstleistungen zu günstigen Preisen. Evidenzbasierte Ex-ante-Analysen zur Folgenabschätzung wirtschaftspolitischer Maßnahmen stellen eine hilfreiche Entscheidungsgrundlage dar.

Germany faces a qualitative change in communication. Broadband applications and Internet services have created an ecosystem with new value chains. Demand for bandwidth is growing rapidly. In ten years' time we expect a transformation to a gigabit economy that relies on very high capacity networks. In Germany, competitors of the former incumbent Deutsche Telekom are the main investors in very high capacity broadband. Internationally, Germany is lagging behind in the coverage of gigabit networks, which leads to a high risk for its future competitiveness. The fi nancing of urgently needed investment seems feasible when taking into consideration today's private investments, international benchmarks and state aid programmes. The government has to set growth-fostering conditions with a clear commitment to a Gigabit network now.

Das Telekommunikationsnetz ist zu einer unverzichtbaren Infrastruktur geworden. Aber die technischen Anforderungen an das Netz sind gewachsen und dünn besiedelte Regionen abgehängt. Damit Unternehmen und Haushalte gigabitfähig werden, ist die rasche Schließung der verbleibenden Glasfaserlücke unabdingbar. Doch der lange Zeit gelobte Netzwettbewerb ist buchstäblich auf den letzten Metern zum Stillstand gekommen. Für zukunftsweisend hält der Autor ein Ausschreibungsverfahren, das die Ortsvermittlungsnetze vom übrigen Netz separiert und diese für die Investition in Glasfaser ausschreibt. ; Economic growth is greatly influenced by digital transformation. One condition is powerful high-capacity broadband connectivity based on fiber optic cables. A large part of German network infrastructure is still based on fiberglass. However, there is still a bottleneck: the 'last mile', which consists of copper wire leading to the end user. At this point the data flow is highly decelerated so that applications which require gigabit connectivity will not be possible. It is questionable whether continuing economic competition among network providers will remove this remaining bottleneck. Going forward the government should not trepidate any longer in closing the gap. As in physical infrastructure such as roads and bridges, the maintenance and upgrading of digital infrastructure is its economic responsibility, too.

Nach langer Abstimmungszeit wurde eine Reform der Anreizregulierungsverordnung in Deutschland verabschiedet. Diese für die Strom- und Gasnetzbetreiber essenzielle Verordnung bestimmt die wirtschaftlichen Rahmenbedingungen der Unternehmen, indem sie deren Erlösmöglichkeiten definiert. Die Novelle sollte vor allem die Investitionsbedingungen verbessern und stellt einen Schwenk zu einem deutlich stärker kostenorientierten System dar. ; After lengthy consultations, the German government has agreed to reform the existing incentive regulation ordinance ('Anreizregulierungsverordung'). Essential for the regulation of power and gas network operators, this ordinance determines the companies' economic framework by defi ning their revenue options. The amendments which focus on improving investment conditions constitute a significant change towards a more cost-oriented system for investments. In addition, other important details have also been changed.

In this paper, I analyze incomplete enforcement in a political economy model. I use a contest framework to explain changes in lobbying behavior when special interest groups anticipate the incomplete enforceability of environmental regulation. In this setting, I compare two instruments, namely an abatement standard and an emission tax. Regulation of a polluting output is proposed and two lobby groups - representing the interests of producers and environmentalists, respectively - seek to influence the government in order to prevent or support the implementation of the regulation. I develop a general framework to demonstrate that the lobbying efforts are determined not only by the stringency of the proposed policy - as determined by the level of the tax or abatement standard - but, importantly, also by its enforceability. Using common functional specifications, I then show that, when an emission tax is proposed, incomplete enforcement may not only reduce the industry's opposition to regulation compared to a situation with full enforcement, but it may, despite the possibility of untruthful reporting, also reduce expected environmental damage. When instead an abatement standard is proposed, however, the effects of regulatory stringency and enforceability are ambiguous, rendering unequivocal policy recommendations for this case impossible.

This paper exploits exceptions in the application of employment protection legislation (EPL) to small firms beneath a particular size threshold to test the theoretical hypothesis that EPL increases the incentives of firms to train their employees in a regression discontinuity setting. Using firm-level data from Finland and Italy provides no empirical evidence for this hypothesis. In fact, the results rather suggest a potentially negative impact, which is unstable across empirical specifications though. We test whether this might be due to a negative selection of employees by comparing firms with low and high shares of old employees. The insignificantly higher effect of EPL for firms with older workers provides at best suggestive evidence that EPL affects training negatively though.

Regulation in the sanitation sector in Brazil is facing a great deal of debate regarding the government level in which conceding authority should reside and how private operators can fulfill social objectives. The main objective of this study is to show that these issues are not the crucial barriers to the development of the sector when one looks at the productivity performance of the operators. Therefore, we elaborate a detailed analysis of the productivity performance of the current structure of the sanitation sector in Brazil. In doing so, we are able to analyze how jurisdiction of operators as well as the nature of the management, either private or public, has affected performance of the current operators. Moreover, we investigate how the absence of tariff regulation has dissipated efficiencies and allowed the practice of monopolistic tariffs.

This paper develops an analytical framework for studying the Baumol-Oates efficiency of traditional single instrument abatement policies vis-a-vis green defaults in the face of price inertia and deliberate defaulting of subpopulations. In this special case of behavioural heterogeneity command and control approaches can outperform price-based instruments and pure tax/subsidy schemes need to be adjusted in order to achieve politically desired levels of abatement. Moreover we prove that choice-preserving nudges are superior to any single-instrument policy in this case. An average marginal abatement cost rule is developed to optimise the green defaults and traditional policies of standards and prices under different degrees of market rigidity.