Source Themes

Mergers, Foreign Competition, and Jobs: Evidence from the U.S. Appliance Industry

Policy choices often entail trade-offs between workers and consumers. I assess how foreign competition changes the consumer welfare and domestic employment effects of a merger. I construct a model accounting for demand responses, endogenous product …

Whom to inform about prices? Evidence from the German gasoline market

Combining a theoretical model of imperfect information with empirical evidence, we show how the effect of providing price information to consumers depends on how well informed they are beforehand. Theoretically, an increase in consumer information …

Does tax policy work when consumers have imperfect price information? Theory and evidence

We investigate how the pass-through rate of commodity taxes depends on competition in a setting where consumers have imperfect information about prices. We use a theoretical search model that has two key predictions. First, the larger the number of …

Preserving contestability in the data economy

Data-driven digital products are becoming ubiquitous, traditional markets are rapidly becoming digitised and a handful of tech companies have come to dominate digital markets. This development has sparked a debate about whether competition …