The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in the European Union in May 2018. We study its short-run impact on investment in new and emerging technology firms. Our findings indicate negative post-GDPR effects on EU ventures, relative to their US counterparts. The negative...

This paper derives a preference for data privacy from consumers' temptation utility. This approach facilitates a welfare analysis of different data privacy regulations, such as the GDPR enacted by the European Union and the CCPA enacted by the state of California, when a fraction of the...

Banks are in the business of taking calculated risks. Expanding the geographic footprint of an organization's profit-making activities changes the geographic pattern of its exposure to loss in ways that are hard for regulators and supervisors to observe. This paper tests and confirms the...

A growing body of new research has emphasized the macroeconomic consequences of transactional impediments in factor markets, and their role in the recurrent restructuring requirements of modern economies. We first review the function institutional arrangements play in facilitating transactions...

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;...

Only large mergers must be reported to the US government, so many anticompetitive deals may effectively avoid antitrust scrutiny. This paper uses data from the dialysis industry to show that premerger notifications are essential to antitrust enforcement and that ensuing enforcement actions...

We analyze optimal policy when consumers of energy-using durables undervalue energy costs relative to their private optima. First, there is an Internality Dividend from Externality Taxes: aside from reducing externalities, they also offset distortions from underinvestment in energy efficiency....

Re-orienting current energy systems toward a far greater reliance on technologies with low or no carbon dioxide emissions is an immense challenge. At the broadest level the histories presented here are very much consistent with widely held views within the energy innovation policy literature. In...

Squaring hourly demand and wind-solar production data for Germany and a number of neighbouring countries with the results of the EU's ESTORAGE project, this paper studies the limits of Germany's energy revolution in view of the volatility of wind and solar power. In addition to pumped storage,...

The most cost-effective policies for achieving CO2 abatement (e.g., carbon taxes) fail to get off the ground politically because of unacceptable distributional consequences. This paper explores CO2 abatement policies designed to address distributional concerns. Using an intertemporal numerical...