The roam-like-at-home regulation (RLAH) eliminated all mobile roaming surcharges to Eu-ropean consumers travelling within the European Economic Area (EEA). We measure the causal impact of the regulation on EEA roaming traffic, using the Rest of the World as a control group. We find large and...

Competition authorities and regulatory agencies sometimes impose pricing restrictions on firms with substantial market power - the dominant firms. We analyze the welfare effects of a ban on behaviour-based price discrimination in a two-period setting where the market displays a competitive and a...

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the factors that can cause price levels to diverge and which are at the root of different inflation rates in Europe including the EU-27. Among others, we study the structural and cyclical factors influencing market and non-market-based service, house...

How does competition affect information acquisition of firms and thus the response of inflation and output to monetary policy shocks? This paper addresses these questions in a new dynamic general equilibrium model with both dynamic rational inattention and oligopolistic competition. In the...

We estimate Okun's law, the negative relationship between output and the unemployment rate, at the sector level for the US, the UK, Japan, and Switzerland to test several hypotheses that may explain why the aggregate Okun's coeffcients are different across countries. Specifically, we show that...

This paper draws on household survey data from countries of all income levels to measure how average unemployment rates vary with income per capita. We document that unemployment is increasing with GDP per capita. Furthermore, we show that this fact is accounted for almost entirely by...

The paper contributes to the growing global VAR (GVAR) literature by showing how global and national shocks can be identified within a GVAR framework. The usefulness of the proposed approach is illustrated in an application to the analysis of the interactions between public debt and real output...

We study how domestic and global output gaps affect CPI inflation. We use a New-Keynesian Phillips curve framework which controls for nonlinear exchange rate movements for a panel of 26 advanced and 22 emerging economies covering the 1994Q1-2017Q4 period. We find broadly that both global and...

Output gaps (OG) identify economic cycles and the cyclical and structural components in government budget balances. A new simple method for estimating OGs is presented here. The new results are more transparent than those published by the leading economic policy institutions. - The retroactive...

Using European Commission real-time data, we show that potential output (PO) estimates were substantially and persistently revised downwards after the Great Recession. We decompose PO revisions into revisions of the capital stock, trend labor, and trend total-factor productivity (TFP)....