David Flacher

Competition and investment in telecommunications: Does competition have the same impact on investment by private and state-owned firms?

The liberalization of telecommunications is largely based on the premise that increasing competition will encourage investment. The hypothesis that liberalization promotes investment has received the most empirical support in recent research. However, a key question that has been largely ignored in the literature is whether competition has the same impact on investment by private and state-owned firms. We conduct an empirical study of the infrastructure investment of 20 incumbent telecommunications operators in OECD countries between 1994 and 2008, and we conclude that greater competitive pressure fosters infrastructure investment by state-owned incumbents but reduces investment by private incumbents.

Tuition fees and social segregation: lessons from a natural experiment at the University of Paris 9-Dauphine

ABSTRACT Using a natural experiment, a sharp rise in tuition fees in some of the programmes at the University of Paris 9-Dauphine, we study the impact of tuition fees on students’ pathways, and outcomes. We apply an optimal matching method to the national database of students’ registrations (SISE) to define a typology of pathways. We then use a nonordered multinomial logit model to evaluate the impact of the rise in tuition fees on the types of pathways selected by the university. We show that there is a significant impact on these pathways. The increase in tuition fees reduces geographic and social mobility, thereby accentuating the phenomena of social segregation. Furthermore, contrary to what some of the studies assert, the rise does not appear to encourage greater effort: we find no impact on the graduation success rate.

Liberalisation in Network Industries

Network industry liberalisation is usually introduced to promote competition and achieve efficiency gains in sectors with some degree of natural monopoly. Liberalisation is usually followed with sector-specific regulation, which aims to ensure competition through monitoring of certain target variables such as price, market concentration, investment, etc. In Europe, telecommunications was the first industry to be liberalised, followed progressively by water, electricity, gas and railways.