Firms often choose with whom to compete and how similar or how different their products should be relative to those of their rivals. This paper investigates this issue in the app economy by studying the determinants of mobile app success. We leverage natural language processing and unsupervised...

Belgium's 2016 payroll tax exemption for first-time employers triggered a sharp increase in firms hiring their first worker but little growth among larger firms. To account for this pattern, we develop and estimate a directed search model - with discrete hiring, firm heterogeneity, and...

imely assessment of regional economic activity in Ukraine is severely constrained by institutional and data-related limitations. Official regional gross regional product (GRP) statistics are available only at low frequency, are published with substantial delays, and, in the post-2022 period, are...