As regulators seek to balance user privacy with publisher sustainability, Google's Privacy Sandbox offers a potential replacement for third-party cookies. This paper presents the first independent estimates of the publisher-side economic effects of Privacy Sandbox, a suite of privacy-enhancing...

We quantify the prevalence of undisclosed influencer posts on Twitter across a large set of brands based on a unique data set of over 100 million posts. We develop a novel method to detect undisclosed influencer posts and find that 96% of influencer posts are not disclosed as such. Despite...

Personal data lie at the forefront of different business models and constitute the main source of revenue of several online companies. In many cases, consumers have incomplete information about the digital transactions of their data. This paper investigates whether highlighting positive or...

Substantial amounts of British capital flowed to Latin America during the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Companies financed by this capital were typically headquartered in the UK, but operated thousands of miles away. This paper asks how this separation between...

This paper argues that openness to goods trade in combination with an unequal distribution of political power has been a major determinant of the comparatively slow development of resource- or land-abundant regions like South America and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. We develop a...

The recent rise in populist governments has led to much work on the question "why now?". Our work takes the next logical step by asking "what next?". That is, given populists in power, what should we expect to be the economic consequences of populist regimes. To answer this, we characterize...

Economists around the world rely in addition to official statistics on business (and consumer) surveys, which are more up-to-date. However, for many emerging and developing countries there is a lack of such surveys. This gap can, at least partly, be filled by the Ifo World Economic Survey (WES)....

This paper presents a new methodology to detect corruption in customs and applies it to Madagascar’s main port. Manipulation of assignment of import declarations to inspectors is identified by measuring deviations from random assignment prescribed by official rules. Deviant declarations are...

How can the West's economic and political polarization be explained? We argue that persuasive lobbying at various levels of government leads to systematic deviations of policies from those desired by the majority. Implemented policies diverge from the majority position despite centripetal forces...

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak has resulted in the death of over four million people since late 2019. To reduce the human and economic costs of COVID-19, different vac-cines have been developed and distributed across countries. There has been significant cross-country variation in...