We study the effects of occupational licensing on consumer choices and market outcomes in a large online platform for residential home services. We exploit exogenous variation in the time at which licenses are displayed on the platform to identify the causal effects of licensing information on...

We model a market for a skill that is in short supply and high demand, where the presence of charlatans (professionals who sell a service that they do not deliver on) is an equilibrium outcome. We use this model to evaluate the standards and disclosure requirements that exist in these markets....

Increased competition from the internet has raised concerns about the quality of prescription drugs sold online. Given the pressure from the Department of Justice, Google agreed to ban pharmacies not certified by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) from sponsored search...

A large literature has analyzed pricing inefficiencies in health insurance markets due to adverse selection, typically assuming informed, active consumers on the demand side of the market. However, recent evidence suggests that many consumers have information frictions that lead to suboptimal...

This paper documents a set of stylized facts about recent trends in cross-border M&A (CBMA) activity around the world. The facts focus on key features of CBMA such as (i) the magnitude; (ii) how it varies across industries and locations; (iii) how it compares to levels of greenfield FDI over time;...

Are country borders still an impediment to trade flows within Europe? Using a rich microlevel survey with 3 million annual shipments of goods by road across 269 European regions, we construct a matrix of bilateral trade flows for 12 industries from 2011 to 2017. We then use the causal inference...

Most observers have concluded that while money markets and government bond markets are rapidly integrating following the introduction of the common currency in the euro area, there is little evidence that a similar integration process is taking place for retail banking. Data on cross-border...

In the last two decades the European financial markets have become more market oriented. We analyze the economic and political forces that have triggered these changes as well as their likely welfare implications. We also try to assess whether this trend will continue. Based on our analysis, we...

The internal market in Europe will greatly increase the international mobility of resources. How will this affect fiscal policy in different countries? The first part of the paper considers taxation of capital in a two country model, where a democratically chosen government in each country...

Can patent protection and product market competition complement each other in enhancing incentives to innovate? In this paper, we address this question by investigating how innovation responses to a substantial policy initiative increasing product market competition interact with the strength of...