Cultural proximity increases bilateral trade flows through a trade-cost and a bilateral-affinity (preferences) channel. Conventional measures of cultural proximity, such as common language, common religion, etc., do not allow to separately quantify those channels empirically. We argue that...

The recommended way of helping households during the ongoing European energy crisis is to allow price signals to operate freely while providing targeted compensation to the vulnerable. In practice, however, institutional, political, and technical constraints have led many European governments to...

We use firm-level data from 10 European countries to establish several new stylized facts about firms' labor market power. First, we find the pervasive presence of labor market power across countries and sectors, measured by average and median markdowns above unity. Second, focusing on the...