This paper explores the economic consequences of the enlargement of the European Union with countries from Central and Eastern Europe. We focus on integration aspects that go beyond the reduction of formal trade barriers, namely accession to the internal market and free movement of labour. The...

This study examines the impact of Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court appointment on U.S. music consumption, specifically exploring changes in streaming patterns on Spotify. With a difference-in-differences approach, we analyze the streaming data of the top 200 songs, revealing a significant...

Digitization has importantly expanded the scope for reusing music in movies, a process known as music synchronization. We use panel data on Netflix and Shazam to estimate the causal effect of music synchronization on the discovery of reused songs. Our results show that songs are substantially...

Model specification and selection are recurring themes in econometric analysis. Both topics become considerably more complicated in the case of large-dimensional data sets where the set of specification possibilities can become quite large. In the context of linear regression models, penalised...

The energy transition increases the demand for minerals from ethnically diverse, conflict-prone developing countries. We study whether and where mining is possible in such countries without raising the risk of civil conflict. We proceed in three steps: First, we propose a theoretical model to...

This article reviews recent theoretical contributions on digital piracy. It starts by elaborating on the reasons for intellectual property protection, by reporting a few facts about copyright protection, and by examining reasons to become a digital pirate. Next, it provides an exploration of the...

If being around smart people makes us smarter and more productive, what can regions do to attract smart people? This paper considers endogenous cultural amenities as a location factor for high-skilled workers. To overcome selection in the provision of cultural amenities, we exploit the variation...

In this guide, we discuss the impact of digitalization on the music industry. We rely on market and survey data at the international level as well as expert statements from the industry. The guide investigates recent developments in legal and technological protection of digital music and...

This paper investigates the impact of the public smoking ban which came into effect in Italy on January 2005 on individual smoking behaviour. Current empirical evidence supports the existence of a negative effect of the Italian ban on smoking prevalence and consumption in the general population....

We study how website defaults affect consumer behavior in the domain of charitable giving. In a field experiment that was conducted on a large platform for making charitable donations over the web, we exogenously vary the default options in two distinct choice dimensions. The first pertains to...