The explosive growth in companies' exploitation of big data is drawing intense scrutiny from European antitrust authorities. EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager has promised to “keep a close eye on how companies use data” and a number of European antitrust authorities have...

Uncertainty about the current state and near-term outlook of an economy as well as the likely course of future policy actions can prompt economic agents to alter their decisions to spend, save, invest and hire. In this paper, we construct three alternative indices to measure the level of...