Essays on goods market regulation, information and communication technologies, research and development and productivity.

Summary A large literature explores the many mechanisms through which competition in goods markets influences factor productivity. In particular, the lack of competition can alter the incentives to innovate and to adopt the most efficient technologies. The purpose of this thesis is to bring new elements to the analysis of this mechanism. Most analyses of the relationship between competition and factor productivity focus only on the effect of competition in a sector on the productivity of that sector. However, the lack of competition in sectors producing intermediate goods may affect incentives in sectors using these goods. Chapter I formalizes this relationship through two mechanisms: difficulties of access to intermediate goods and rent-sharing between the producer and user sectors of these goods. The empirical analysis in chapter II seems to confirm this link, with anti-competitive regulations on the intermediate goods producing sectors reducing the productivity of the user sectors. Chapters III and IV propose an empirical analysis of the role of investment in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the influence of anti-competitive regulations in goods markets on Total Factor Productivity (TFP), using panels of aggregate data from OECD countries. The estimation results show that anti-competitive regulations reduce the demand for ICT and that such a reduction leads to a decline in TFP.