There is growing worldwide concern about bias in the enforcement of competition law in favour of domestic firms. Even seemingly neutral antitrust laws can lead discrimination if they are enforced selectively. Authors investigate the distortions that national competition authorities generate when...

Has economic research been helpful in dealing with the financial crises of the early 2000s? On the whole, the answer is negative, although there are bright spots. Economists have largely failed to predict both crises, largely because most of them were not analytically equipped to understand...

This paper distils three lessons for bank regulation from the experience of the 2009-12 euro-area financial crisis. First, it highlights the key role that sovereign debt exposures of banks have played in the feedback loop between bank and fiscal distress, and inquires how the regulation of...

If unemployment insurance is more generous, workers should demand less implicit insurance from their employers: firm- and government-provided insurance should be substitutes. Using a firm-level international panel dataset, we investigate this hypothesis exploiting cross-country and time-series...

Corporate leverage responds differently to employees' rights in bankruptcy depending on whether it is driven by strategic concerns in wage bargaining or by credit constraints. Using novel data on employees' rights in bankruptcy, we estimate their impact on leverage, exploiting time-series,...

Most regulators around the world reacted to the 2007-09 crisis by imposing bans or constraints on short-selling. These were imposed and lifted at different dates in different countries, often applied to different sets of stocks and featured varying degrees of stringency. We exploit this...