Cities worldwide have regulated peer-to-peer short-term rental platforms claiming that those platforms remove apartments from the long-term housing market, causing an in- crease in rents. Establishing and quantifying such a causal link is, however, challenging. We investigate two policy changes...

We exploit two policy interventions in Berlin, Germany, to causally identify the impact of Airbnb on rental markets. While the first intervention significantly reduced the number of high-availability Airbnb listings bookable for most of the year, the second intervention led to the exit of...

One key question that arises when assessing a supply-side theory is to what extent a firm that is not yet present in the market but has capabilities to repurpose its production capacity constitutes a competitive constraint to firms operating in the focal market. The main challenge for...

Der Koalitionsvertrag, den CDU, CSU und SPD Ende November 2013 veröffentlich haben, enthält im Hinblick auf die wirtschaftliche und soziale Entwicklung viele konkrete und ehrgeizige Ziele: So sollen die Investitionsausgaben steigen, die Einkommenssituation ausgewählter Gruppen von Rentnern...

The rise of online platforms has disrupted numerous traditional industries. A prime example is the short-term accommodation platform Airbnb and how it affects the hotel industry. On the one hand, consumers can profit from Airbnb due to an increased number of choices and lower prices. On the...

This paper investigates the impact of price transparency on equilibrium prices and fees by considering a policy change implemented by Airbnb that affected the transparency of cleaning fees for IP addresses from the European Union (EU). Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find a...

Are there economies of scale to data in internet search? This paper is first to use real search engine query logs to empirically investigate how data drives the quality of internet search results. We find evidence that the quality of search results improve with more data on previous searches....

The rise of dominant firms in data driven industries is often credited to their alleged data advantage. Empirical evidence lending support to this conjecture is surprisingly scarce. In this paper we document that data as an input into machine learning tasks display features that support the...

Data is often at the core of digital products and services, especially when related to online advertising. This has made data protection and privacy a major policy concern. When surfing the web, consumers leave digital traces that can be used to build user profiles and infer preferences. We...