This paper characterizes the optimal investigation and leniency policies when the Competition Authority is privately informed about the strength of a cartel case. I show that the Competition Authority can then exploit firms' uncertainty about the risk of conviction to obtain confessions even...

We study the employment effects of loan guarantee programs aiming at mitigating financing frictions for small businesses. Exploiting worker-level panel data combined with plausibly exogenous heterogeneity in policy generosity across French regions, we find that such programs have a significant...