Rent control is a highly debated social policy that has been omnipresent since World War I. Since the 2010s, it is experiencing a true renaissance, for many cities and countries facing chronic housing shortages are desperately looking for solutions, directing their attention to controling housing rents and other restrictive policies. Is rent control useful or does it create more damage than utility? ...
This paper re-evaluates the US external deficit which has considerably widened over the 1990s. US safe asset provision to the rest of the world is the dominant explanation for the persistent nature of the US external deficit. We suggest that apart from the safe asset hypothesis, there is an important role for technology shocks originating in US multinational companies that have a strong foreign direct ...
This paper analyses the pass-through rates and their determinants of the temporary German fuel discount in 2022 at its start and its termination. Based on a unique dataset of fuel station characteristics and prices, we employ a Regression Discontinuity in Time (RDiT) methodology to estimate heterogeneous pass-through rates. Our main contribution is to identify the impact of horizontal and vertical ...
We discuss the main theories of harm in EU merger control and their evolution since the 1990s. We present stylized facts and trends using data extracted from EU merger decisions by natural language processing tools. EU merger policy has adapted over time, both in terms of legislation and theories of harm, as well as in terms of the investigative tools and evidence used. The introduction of the new ...
We examine how competition affects VAT pass-through in isolated oligopolistic markets as defined by the Greek islands. Using daily gasoline prices and a difference-in-differences methodology, we investigate how changes in VAT rates are passed through to consumers in islands with different market structure. We show that pass-through increases with competition, going from 50% in monopoly to around 80% ...
