Appropriately designed Product Market Regulation (PMR) is essential to enhance productivity, boost economic growth and increase welfare. Regulation is needed to address market failures and guarantee the health and safety of consumers. However, by limiting the entry and expansion of firms, a too...

The increased adoption of digital technologies has been transforming the Spanish economy. The COVID-19 crisis is expected to speed up this process. The new digital strategy, ‘Digital Spain 2025’, features a number of ambitious objectives in a timely manner. There is a need to promote digital...

Drawing insights from the field of innovation economics, we discuss the likely competitive environment shaping generative AI advances. Central to our analysis are the concepts of appropriability--whether firms in the industry are able to control the knowledge generated by their innovations--and...

This paper examines problems of entry, exit and competition in Ukrainian product markets. It finds that Ukraine still has too little of all three, and that exit mechanisms, in particular, function poorly. Since impediments to entry and exit are largely the product of excessive and ill...

This paper examines problems of entry, exit and competition in Ukrainian product markets. It finds that Ukraine still has too little of all three, and that exit mechanisms, in particular, function poorly. Since impediments to entry and exit are largely the product of excessive and ill...

This paper documents how US firms organize goods production across firm and country boundaries. Most US firms that perform physical transformation tasks in-house using foreign manufacturing plants in 2007 also own US manufacturing plants; moreover manufacturing comprises their main domestic...

When labour market competition is imperfect, positive industry (and firm) productivity shocks can be passed through to workers in the form of higher wages. We document how the UK auto industry, following a period of decline, experienced a four-decade-long productivity boom. There was a...

Career opportunities and expectations shape people's decisions and can diminish over time. In this paper, we study the career implications of automation and robotization using a novel data set of resumes from approximately 16 million individuals from the United States. We calculate the lifetime...

We present results from a randomized controlled trial in Bangladesh that introduced operational practices to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions in 276 "zigzag" brick kilns. 65% of intervention kilns adopted the improved practices. Treatment assignment reduced energy use by 10.3%...

Digital markets have raised a number of new competition challenges. Ex-post competition policy appears not to be able to address them in their entirety and with the necessary speed. There is considerable consensus, among academics and policy-makers, that ex-ante regulatory policies are needed to...