Topic Markets

Rent Control, Market Segmentation, and Misallocation: Causal Evidence from a Large-Scale Policy Intervention

This paper studies market segmentation that arises from the introduction of rent control. When a part of the market remains unregulated, theory predicts an increase of free-market rents due to the misallocation of households to dwellings. To document this mechanism empirically, we study a large-scale policy intervention in the German housing market. We isolate the misallocation mechanism by exploiting ...

The Rise and Fall of Social Housing? Housing Decommodification in Long-run Comparison

The comparative study of housing decommodification lags behind classical welfare state research, while housing research itself is rich in homeownership studies but lacks comparative accounts of private and social rentals due to missing comparative data. Building on existing works and various primary sources, this study presents a new collection of up to forty-eight countries’ social housing shares ...

Government Ownership and Competition: Evidence from the European Airline Industry following the COVID-19-Pandemic

This paper empirically analyses the impact of government ownership on competition. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent governmental equity interventions in the European airline industry provides for a particularly ideal setting to investigate this topic, and this for several reasons. First, airline markets and competition therein are well-defined and well-understood. Second, European countries...

How Shocks Affect Stock Market Participation

While there is a broad consensus in the literature that stock ownership is associated with individual characteristics, such as wealth, income, risk preferences, and financial literacy, less is known about the dynamics of stock market participation (SMP). Major fluctuations in SMP are oftentimes related to political events, economic shocks, and technological disruptions. We discuss the literature...

8th BCCP Forum

Leibniz ScienceCampusBerlin Centre for Consumer Policies (BCCP) Forum The Forum will bring together all BCCP fellows in law and economics who are engaged in the activities of the science campus. We will have the opportunity to learn about each other’s research during short presentations by the different partner institutions followed by open discussion. The objective of the meeting is to encourage...

Sponsored Bids in Online Labor Markets

Advertising on e-commerce platforms, which enables third-party sellers to place their products as sponsored listings within organic results, is a widespread phenomenon, creating large revenues for online marketplaces. While economic theory suggests that advertising can serve as a signal for product quality, the empirical evidence is ambiguous. In this project, I collect data from a leading online...

The Emission Intensity Effect: Carbon Border Adjustments in the Presence of Heterogeneous Firms

In the absence of globally coordinated action to combat climate change, governments are concerned that ambitious carbon pricing could harm the competitiveness of emission-intensive industries. A prominent measure to prevent that manufacturing producers relocate to countries with laxer environmental regulation are carbon border adjustments often referred to as carbon tariffs. Several studies have...

The Distributuional Impact of Real-Time Pricing

Economic sanctions: Coalitions increase the cost for the target and reduce own burden

What is the role of coalitions in enforcing sanctions? In a newly released study, researchers at IfW Kiel and DIW Berlin analyse the economic impact of jointly implementing punitive measures in the context of the 2012 Iran and 2014 Russia sanctions. They find that coalitions serve two crucial purposes -- they not only magnify the economic cost imposed on the target but also reduce domestic costs for ...

Competition and Mergers with Strategic Data Intermediaries

We analyze mergers between strategic data intermediaries collecting consumer information that they sell to firms competing in a product market. We show that a merger: (a) reduces the intensity of competition in the product market through a change in the selling strategies of merging intermediaries; (b) increases data collection, reducing consumer surplus through a better rent extraction. We argue...