Net neutrality is a hotly debated topic. A key point is the treatment of the data by internet providers: as users are a¤ected by the waiting times of data delivery, internet providers have an incentive to o¤er content providers di¤erent priorities. Net neutrality regulation does not allow prioritization. We study the e¤ect of regulation on the incentives to innovate of content and service providers. In the short run, regulation increases content provision at the edge by a fringe, while it decreases the number of applications of a large provider. In the long run, the internet provider adjusts capacity to maintain constant the average waiting time. Regulation leads to lower supply of capacity and overall content, although it fosters entry of new content providers.JEL code: D4, L12, L4, L43, L51, L52.

We investigate how cooperative firms reacted to the current crisis. This allows us to compare the behavior of cooperative and conventional firms facing exogenous shifts in demand. After a short survey of a stream of theoretical literature, we analyze a large group of Italian production cooperatives in the periods 2003-2010 and 1994-2011 and we contrast co-ops behavior with the overall trend in the industries in which they operate. Our sample's evidence suggests that the cooperative's behavior has a stabilizing effect on employment with respect to shocks in output demand. Unlike profit-maximizers, cooperative firms seem to be adjusting pay more than employment when facing shocks. Production co-ops look better equipped than their profitmaximizing counterparts in tackling the long recession also because they have been very cautious in their profit policies over time. Unlike conventional firms, they have significantly increased their own equity during "good" years instead of distributing large dividends to their members. We are grateful to

There is no place like England to witness the role of pubs as a social networking hotspot. Social networks lie at the foundations of most of the social and economic interactions of individuals. The aim of this paper is to assess the importance of pubs as natural locations for the development of social networks and how their presence affects the socio-economic activity of a given area or region. The econometric analysis conducted on rural parishes in Cumbria, a peripheral county in Northern England, reveals that village pubs have a positive influence on the socio-economic activity of local communities.village pubs, rural communities, socio-economic activity,

Behaviour-based price discrimination (BBPD) is typically analysed in a framework characterised by perfectly inelastic demand. This paper provides a …rst assessment of the role of demand elasticity on the pro…t, consumer and welfare e¤ects of BBPD. We show that the demand expansion e¤ect, that is obviously overlooked by the standard framework with unit demand, plays a relevant role. In comparison to uniform pricing, we show that …rms are worse o¤ under BBPD, however, as demand elasticity increases the negative impact of BBPD on pro…ts gets smaller. Despite a possible slight increase in the average prices charged over the two periods in comparison to uniform pricing, we show that BBPD boosts consumer surplus and that this bene…t is independent of elasticity. In contrast to the welfare results derived under the unit demand assumption, where BBPD is always bad for welfare, the paper shows that BBPD can be welfare enhancing if demand elasticity is su¢ ciently high.

We investigate how cooperative firms reacted to the current crisis. This allows us to compare the behavior of cooperative and conventional firms facing exogenous shifts in demand. After a short survey of a stream of theoretical literature, we analyze a large group of Italian production cooperatives in the periods 2003-2010 and 1994-2011 and we contrast co-ops behavior with the overall trend in the industries in which they operate. Our sample's evidence suggests that the cooperative's behavior has a stabilizing effect on employment with respect to shocks in output demand. Unlike profit-maximizers, cooperative firms seem to be adjusting pay more than employment when facing shocks. Production co-ops look better equipped than their profitmaximizing counterparts in tackling the long recession also because they have been very cautious in their profit policies over time. Unlike conventional firms, they have significantly increased their own equity during "good" years instead of distributing large dividends to their members. We are grateful to