The paper aims at measuring the rental housing market regulations in Germany between 1913 and 2015. Four classes of housing policy are considered: Rent controls, tenant protection, rationing of housing, and fostering of social housing. Based on a thorough analysis of federal and regional...

This paper explores whether governments can ban carbon-intensive materials through product carbon requirements. By setting near-zero emission limits for the production of materials to be sold within a jurisdiction, governments would accelerate the phase out of carbon-intensive production...

Rising rents in German cities have led to an intense debate about the need for tighter rent controls in housing markets. In April 2015, the so-called rental brake was introduced, which imposes upper bounds for rents in new contracts, in order to immediately slow down the increase of rents in...

A world of unequal carbon prices requires measures aimed at preventing carbon leakage. Climate policy imperatives demand that such measures must be compatible with the goal of sending a carbon price signal down the value chain. For carbon intensive materials, the combination of dynamic free...

The EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is the main instrument to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Europe. Subject to a country specific limit, installations in the EU ETS can use EU allowances (EUA) and certified emissions reductions (CERs) generated through the Clean Development Mechanism...

We study the effect of a merger in a dynamic high-technology industry -- the videogame market -- which is characterized by frequent introduction of new products. To assess the impact of the merger between two large specialist retailers in the UK, we perform a difference-in-differences analysis...

Previous work has shown that state-level antitrust enforcement activity may have impacts on entry and relocation behavior by U.S. firms. Significant state-level antitrust activity may be an indicator of a perceived adverse business environment and it is found to deter establishment entry,...

We study the evolution of the EC's merger decision procedure over the first 25 years of European competition policy. Using a novel dataset constructed at the level of the relevant markets and containing all merger cases over the 1990-2014 period, we evaluate how consistently arguments related to...

Common ownership - where two firms are at least partially owned by the same investor - and its impact on product market outcomes has recently drawn a lot of attention from scholars and practitioners alike. Theoretical and empirical researchsuggests that common ownership can lead to higher...

I study the predictability of the EC's merger decision procedure before and after the 2004 merger policy reform based on a dataset covering all affected markets of mergers with an official decision documented by DG Comp between 1990 and 2014. Using the highly flexible, non-parametric random...