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This study aims to investigate both market concentration and bank competition of banking across six emerging Asian countries (e.g., Bangladesh, Indonesia, India, Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam) over pre and post the 2008 global financial crisis. The conduct parameter approach following the framework suggested by Uchida and Tsutsui (2005) is used to estimate bank competition in these countries. The study employs both seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) and three-stage least squares (3SLS) to estimate simultaneously the system of equations in our model. Generally we find a negative association between market concentration and bank competition across most of the countries in the study suggesting that banks in concentrated markets collude to generate higher profits. Monopolistic competition was the best description of competitive structure of banking across the majority of countries investigated by this study. The study fills the gap in the banking literature by investigating bank competition, concentration, and their relationship across emerging Asian economies over the 2008 global financial crisis. Moreover, several policy implications for banking industry are suggested.

Purpose: This chapter addresses the main issues about regulation and protection of competition in Kosovo, with particular attention given to the control of enterprises concentration. The importance of controlling concentrations is based on the fact that enterprise concentration, whether local or international, can produce unequitable market conditions, creating monopolistic positions for some. Therefore, control of access from the Competition Authority is necessary, in order for competition to a level playing field for all.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The authors carried out a desk review of academic literature, the national reports provided by the competition authority and international institutions, competition law and other available important data. This is to determine and highlight the development of economic competition and control of concentrations, for example regulation and supervision in Kosovo and to determine whether this is in line with European Union directives.

Findings: Findings show that competition in Kosovo is still at a phase of development and more is needed to improve and ensure an adequate competition regime in accordance with EU regulations and practices. Significant efforts are necessary to improve legislative alignment and enforcement, specifically on control of mergers and acquisitions.

Practical Implications: The authors herein propose a few measures to be undertaken in order to ensure the effective implementation of the law on the protection of competition and the market economy.

Originality/Value: The authors define the needs for strengthening and the implementation of Competition Law in Kosovo, such as undertaking the proper coordinated steps in order to have adequate competition authority.

This article explores the trade-offs between market concentration and multi-market participation in evaluating proposed mergers. For complementary demands, the price-decreasing effect of multi-market participation provides a countervailing influence on the price-increasing effect of higher concentration. The larger the footprint of the multi-market provider, the greater the likelihood the price-decreasing effect dominates. Higher concentration may be consistent with non-increasing prices despite the absence of merger economies. In the case of substitutes, multi-market participation compounds the price-increasing effect of higher concentration. Merger guidelines that place undue emphasis on market concentration can lead policymakers to block mergers that enhance consumer welfare and vice versa.

Research on creative workers speaks to the relative lack of job opportunities available, the role that changing production logics play in shaping such opportunities, and gender disparities in success. Tracking 22,561 hits found on Billboard's mainstream charts, we examine various factors that may spur or hamper the success of female recording acts. We find that the expanding logic of decentralized production eliminates the negative effect of concentration on the success of female acts and that the presence of successful female acts in one period bodes well for subsequent female acts, until a glass ceiling of sorts is reached.

Objective – The current biotechnology revolution has been associated with newly developed genetic modifications (GM) that offer new prospects for increasing agricultural productivity. This has stimulated a rapid adoption of GM corn hybrids by U.S. farmers. Yet, there is concern about the structure of competition among biotech firms that own patents over GM traits. This chapter evaluates the spatial differences in pricing of biotech corn hybrids, with a focus on the fringe versus core regions of the U.S. Corn Belt.

Methods – The analysis examines how local conditions and market concentrations affect the pricing of GM corn hybrids in different locations.

Results – We find evidence of more extensive subadditive pricing in the fringe region. We also examine how both own- and cross-market concentrations affect prices across regions. For GM hybrids, the results show that market power is generally more prevalent in the core region compared to the fringe.

Conclusions – The evidence shows that the pricing of GM corn hybrids varies across space. The observed pricing schemes benefit farmers more in the fringe than in the core region of the Corn Belt.

The health care industry has been influenced by changes in the market structure and new technological developments during the recent decades. With the new technological developments in medicine, some less complex care moved out of the hospitals that led to decrease in demand for inpatient services. This recent change in hospital care created excess capacity in hospital markets, and therefore hospitals started to explore potential financial gains through horizontal consolidations. This has resulted in a wave of mergers in 1990s, which transformed the US, Canadian and European hospital markets. This, in turn, created concerns among policy makers and researchers in terms of its welfare implications.

The insurance industry often experiences criticism for unethical and frequently illegal activities. This document suggests that insurers operate in an uncompetitive environment and that the nature of insurer operations leads otherwise ethical individuals in the direction of questionable ethical decisions throughout the operations of an insurance company.

The goal of this chapter is to analyse the decisions of the Croatian Competition Agency in the field of grocery retail mergers in the 2004–2009 period. In particular, various criteria used by the Competition Agency to evaluate grocery retail mergers are identified and discussed.

Using the comparative approach the author attempts to detect the relevant sources for certain solutions embraced by the Competition Agency by examining especially the relevant practice of the European Commission as well as relevant decisions adopted by some competition authorities in EU member states.

The grocery retail market in Croatia has seen a flurry of mergers since 2004 with the largest competitor spreading to various local markets. For the Croatian competition authority this merger wave has perhaps been the biggest challenge since its inception. In the face of growing market concentration, the authority saw fit to shift from initially providing green light to duly notified transactions to subsequently addressing serious competition concerns by ordering a number of remedies. The Croatian competition authority relied extensively on EU acquis when deciding on specific merger cases, especially as regards the relevant market definition.

The value of the chapter is reflected in the fact that this kind of comparative analysis of Croatian merger cases in the field of grocery retail mergers was not available before. It is especially in the light of the accession of Croatia to the EU, as foreseen on 1 July 2013, that this kind of study becomes useful both for domestic but also EU audience.

This chapter reviews the key results obtained in previous studies of airline mergers. It is found that the effect of mergers on airfares is dependent on the network configurations of merging airlines. Fare increases are frequently observed on overlapped routes. However, if the networks of two merging airlines are complementary, the expanded network after the merger leads to cost savings, increase in travel options, and improvement in service quality. Therefore, in a deregulated market, with few entry barriers, relaxing merger regulations is likely to improve welfare. However, most welfare evaluations do not incorporate quality changes or dynamic competition effects. Empirical investigations are primarily ex post analysis of mergers that have already passed antitrust reviews. The relationship between market concentration and welfare might be nonlinear and market specific. Therefore, airline mergers and alliances should be reviewed case by case. Methodological improvements are needed in future studies to control for the effects of complicating factors inherent in ex post evaluations.