The paper aims at assessing the costs and benefits of antitrust enforcement. The analysis starts with an investigation of why competition is typically worth protecting followed by a collection of empirical evidence which shows that competition actually needs protection by antitrust policy in...

Determinants of a firm's export-sales ratio (degree of internationalisation) are frequently discussed in the literature related to individual firms' export activities. Stylised facts show a positive relationship between firm size and firm age on the one hand and the firm's export-sales ratio on...

Within the last three years, Google has acquired YouTube and DoubleClick and has attempted to control part of Yahoo!'s search advertising business. Two of the deals have not raised antitrust concerns by competition authorities. I review these deals with a focus on consumer welfare. Consumers are...

This paper studies the aggregate substitution and expansion effects triggered by changes in input prices, in a context where firms supply a homogenous commodity and compete in quantities à la Cournot. We derive a sufficient condition for the existence of a Cournot equilibrium and show that this...

Normalising CES production functions in the calibration of basic dynamic models allows to choose technology parameters in an economically plausible way. When variations in the elasticity of substitution are considered, normalisation is necessary in order to exclude arbitrary effects. As an...

This paper empirically estimates the effects of a new thin-capitalization rule on the financing behavior of German corporations employing a fixed effects difference-in-difference approach. We compare treatment and control groups separated by a hypothetical application of the new rule in three...

The propagation of macroeconomic shocks through input-output and geographic networks can be a powerful driver of macroeconomic fluctuations. We first exposit that in the presence of Cobb-Douglas production functions and consumer preferences, there is a specific pattern of economic transmission...