|
on Regulation |
| By: | Nestor Duch-Brown; Christos Genakos; Blair Yuan Lyu |
| Abstract: | We study the impact of Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy, which requires apps to obtain explicit user permission before cross-app tracking, on the mobile gaming industry. Using SensorTower US data on the top 5, 000 games on iOS and Android (2020-2023) and a difference-in-differences design, we show that ATT increases iOS games' revenue and revenue per user, with little impact on user numbers. Gains arise from re-optimised in-app purchase menus and more major updates, not higher prices or paywalls. ATT raises concentration and reduces entry, benefiting Apple and incumbents while raising barriers to entry for new competitors. |
| Keywords: | privacy regulation, digital platforms, mobile gaming industry, App Tracking Transparency (ATT), market structure and concentration |
| Date: | 2026–08–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2207 |
| By: | Andonov, Aleksandar; Rauh, Joshua |
| Abstract: | Private equity (PE), institutional investors, and foreign corporations own 58% of wind, 47% of solar, and 34% of natural gas electricity generation. These new entrants are twice as likely to create new power plants as incumbent domestic listed utilities, highlighting a new role for PE in large-scale asset creation. They also acquire existing plants. While fossil-fuel plant sales to foreign corporations extend operations, PE has similar decommissioning rates to incumbents. The new owners create more efficient plants and improve acquired ones. Market deregulation drives the results, highlighting the dual importance of competition and new financing for both creation and acquisitions. |
| Keywords: | Innovation; Regulation; Energy; Ownership structure; Private equity; Electricity market; Utilities |
| JEL: | G23 G24 G32 H54 L51 L71 L94 O13 Q41 Q48 |
| Date: | 2024–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:19289 |
| By: | Andrés-Cerezo, David; Fabra, Natalia |
| Abstract: | Decarbonizing the power sector requires major investments in renewables and storage. Though often seen as complementary, these technologies can act as substitutes from an economic perspective. When renewable output correlates positively with demand and capacity is low, storage may lower renewable profits, and vice versa — especially with strategic thermal producers. In markets with negatively correlated renewables, like solar and wind, storage can benefit one while disadvantaging the other. These findings inform policies on the timing and effectiveness of mandates or subsidies, suggesting that solar investments may need an initial push before supporting storage. Simulations of the Spanish market show that, at high solar penetration, storage boosts solar profits but reduces wind profits. |
| Keywords: | market power |
| JEL: | L94 Q40 Q42 Q48 Q50 |
| Date: | 2024–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:19294 |
| By: | Alisaleh Shariati |
| Abstract: | Energy policy has consequences that extend well beyond producers and pipelines to impact household and business costs. In North America, a key factor keeping energy affordable is the flow of Canadian natural gas into US markets. When gas moves freely across the border, households and businesses save billions of dollars. When gas trade is disrupted, those additional costs are passed on to consumers through higher heating bills, higher electricity prices, and higher costs for goods and services. This makes an integrated Canada–US natural gas market a major competitive advantage for both countries. It lowers energy costs, strengthens electricity reliability, supports manufacturing, and helps meet rapidly growing demand from data centers and other energy intensive industries. Preserving and strengthening this integration should be a priority for policymakers on both sides of the border. |
| Keywords: | natural gas, Canada–US energy trade, energy integration, USMCA, natural gas exports, pipelines, energy affordability, electricity prices, energy security, grid reliability, manufacturing competitiveness, data centres, artificial intelligence, LNG, cross-border infrastructure, North America |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sls:resrep:2602 |
| By: | Ullrich, Hannes; Hannane, Jonas; Peukert, Christian; Aguiar, Luis; Duso, Tomaso |
| Abstract: | Tracking online user behavior is essential for targeted advertising and is at the heart of the business model of major online platforms. We analyze tracker-specific web browsing data to show how the prediction quality of consumer profiles varies with data size and scope. We find decreasing returns to the number of observed users and tracked websites. However, prediction quality increases considerably when web browsing data can be combined with demographic data. We show that Google, Facebook, and Amazon, which can combine such data at scale via their digital ecosystems, may thus attenuate the impact of regulatory interventions such as the GDPR. In this light, even with decreasing returns to data small firms can be prevented from catching up with these large incumbents. We document that proposed data-sharing provisions may level the playing field concerning the prediction quality of consumer profiles. |
| Keywords: | Prediction quality; Web tracking; Cookies; Data Protection; Competition policy; Internet regulation; Gdpr |
| JEL: | C53 D22 D43 K21 L13 L4 |
| Date: | 2024–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:19266 |
| By: | Johanna Bola\~nos-Zu\~niga; Alberto J. Lamadrid |
| Abstract: | In this study, we use electricity demand growth, cooling requirements, and backup system operation to evaluate the environmental and economic implications of artificial intelligence data centers in the United States. Our results indicate that impacts are not determined solely by facility design, but by the broader electricity, water, and land-use systems in which these facilities operate. Emissions are primarily driven by electricity consumption and therefore depend on marginal generation mixes, transmission constraints, and the spatial and temporal distribution of demand. Analysis further shows that local effects include pressures on water resources, increased noise exposure, and land-use changes, with outcomes varying across regions and infrastructure conditions. The assessment of technological and operational measures shows that improvements in energy efficiency, cooling configurations, and operational strategies can reduce these impacts, although their effectiveness depends on system-level conditions. Evaluation of regulatory and market structures suggests that existing frameworks may not fully account for location- and time-specific externalities. These findings support the need for integrated policy approaches that align data center deployment and operation with electricity system characteristics, water availability, and land-use planning to improve overall environmental and economic performance. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.09882 |
| By: | Maria Garcia-Osipenko; Nicolai V. Kuminoff; Spencer Perry; Nicholas Vreugdenhil |
| Abstract: | Utilities increasingly sell electricity using complex menus of time-constant and time-varying price schedules. We study how to design such a menu to maximize social welfare in a second-best environment where the marginal private and external costs of generating electricity vary over time, institutional constraints prevent mandating time-varying pricing and consumer behavior is distorted by frictions. We develop a model of plan choice, consumption and intertemporal substitution with time-varying marginal social costs and estimate it using administrative data from a large utility. We provide evidence of substantial intertemporal substitution in response to time-varying price incentives and selection across plans based on multidimensional heterogeneity. While the current menu’s time-varying plans substantially shift consumption from high-price to low-price hours, we find that they reduce social welfare. This loss is mitigated by information frictions. We show how to redesign the menu to simultaneously improve outcomes for consumers, the utility and the environment. |
| Keywords: | electricity pricing; time-of-use pricing; menu design; consumer choice; social welfare |
| JEL: | D12 D47 L94 Q40 Q50 |
| Date: | 2026–08–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:feddwp:103621 |
| By: | Felix Montag |
| Abstract: | Current enforcement practice does not consider how mergers alter the merging parties' incentives to petition for trade protection. I document mergers between domestic producers across jurisdictions that are followed by tariff petitions. I develop a model to characterize the trade-policy channel of mergers. Theoretically, a domestic merger raises the profitability of tariffs when offshoring is unavailable; once offshoring is possible, the effect becomes ambiguous. I apply this framework to a merger between domestic producers in the U.S. appliance industry. Empirically, I find that when import competition is weak, the merging parties prefer to lower their own costs through offshoring; when import competition is strong, the merger makes it more profitable for them to raise their foreign rivals' costs through tariffs. The resulting consumer harm is comparable in magnitude to the direct market-power effect. A hypothetical cross-border merger reduces the profitability of tariffs in this market. |
| Keywords: | competition, lobbying, tariffs, protectionism, mergers |
| JEL: | F13 L13 L41 D72 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12880 |
| By: | Christos A. Makridis |
| Abstract: | Jurisdictions compete for mobile facilities, but utilities may recover supporting capital costs from customers outside the host. I develop a model of jurisdictional bidding in which sites differ in productive surplus, local benefits, infrastructure costs, and how much of those costs local residents bear. Cost socialization raises a jurisdiction’s willingness to win and can direct the project to a lower-welfare site. The firm and host may gain even as regional welfare falls. Its effect on cash subsidies is ambiguous because connection charges and rival bids also change. Cash caps induce substitution toward in-kind support and can worsen site selection. Charging the firm for net incremental costs, or assessing the host for costs imposed on outside customers, restores the efficient ranking when political benefits are equal across sites. With uncertain load, broader cost sharing raises committed and unused capacity. Numerical exercises show where these distortions are largest and when subsidy caps backfire. |
| Keywords: | fiscal competition, business incentives, infrastructure, cost allocation, data centers, irreversible investment |
| JEL: | H25 H71 H77 L51 L94 R38 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12894 |
| By: | Oleynov, Anton |
| Abstract: | Formally accountable regulation can remain inadequate when its objectives are privately, technically, or distributionally insulated from democratic authorization. This article introduces economic constitutionalism as a second-order framework that extends regulatory legitimacy analysis from the conduct of regulators to the authority to define what regulation is for. The analysis reconstructs authorization assumptions across regulatory legitimacy, capture, public-purpose, and quantification literatures and derives three mechanisms of regulatory-purpose displacement and four design properties for purpose-responsive regulation. Applications to artificial intelligence, platform labor, education, care, and public information demonstrate the framework's comparative diagnostic reach. The argument shifts the regulatory design agenda from procedural compliance alone to the authorization and revision of regulatory purpose. |
| Date: | 2026–08–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:r2x9y_v1 |
| By: | Ivan Conjeaud; Gaspard Abel; Argyris Kalogeratos |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the effect of asynchrony in agents' updates in the emergence of algorithmic collusion. We present a continuous-time model for algorithmic collusion in which two firms use $Q$-learning algorithms to set prices asynchronously in a Bertrand duopoly. The firms update their prices at times dictated by a Poisson clock. By controlling the extent of agents' asynchrony, we run extensive numerical experiments with three specifications of the algorithm to investigate the emergence of algorithmic collusion. The strength of collusion is measured by a standard collusion index, as well as by automatically detecting the reward-punishment schemes. This is done by recording a large number of algorithms' reactions to unilateral price cuts and comparing them with the reactions of untrained algorithms. Our findings indicate that asynchrony hampers collusion, especially when the algorithms are stateless. When they condition on their competitor's previous prices, the sensitivity of algorithmic collusion to asynchrony varies depending on the type of information they have access to. The implications of these results for the regulation of algorithmic pricing are discussed. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.01406 |
| By: | Sydnee Caldwell; Arindrajit Dube; Suresh Naidu |
| Abstract: | The literature on imperfect competition in labor markets has expanded rapidly in recent years. This article provides a guide to the field, focusing on the firm-specific ("residual") labor supply elasticity as the definition of a firm's labor market power. We present a general framework showing how this elasticity nests the three widely studied sources of monopsony power: search frictions, preference heterogeneity, and employer concentration. We summarize the empirical estimates of the elasticity of labor supply, highlighting sources of possible heterogeneity. We emphasize that it is difficult to infer elasticities from markdowns (and vice versa) due to the diversity of firm wage-setting practices, illustrating this point using the interaction between monopsony and efficiency wages. We discuss how policy issues in antitrust, labor market regulation, immigration, and macroeconomics interact with monopsony and conclude by listing several areas for future research. |
| JEL: | J3 J30 J42 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35608 |
| By: | Eliseo Curcio |
| Abstract: | Interconnection queues, not electricity prices, now govern where data centers can be built, and the standard levelized-cost comparison answers a question no developer faces: it assumes a load profile, freezes the grid price while modeling the demand that moves it, and quotes busbar costs a facility cannot buy. This paper evaluates nine on-site supply technologies against a delivered grid whose price is endogenous to projected data-center demand, on a complete-site basis that retains standby charges, with measured GPU training load, delivered fuel prices, production-pathway carbon, and statutory 45V and 48E incentive mechanics. Nothing beats the wire: gas combined cycle produces at 47 USD/MWh but costs about 114 USD per megawatt-hour of complete site energy against a 92 USD grid; four-hour storage is physically capped near 18 percent of annual energy and, charged at the margin, dirtier than the grid; hydrogen from grid-priced power fails on cost and carbon together. An investment inversion converts these findings into capital terms: conversion-hardware learning buys nothing, because free hardware still exceeds the grid for every low-carbon arm, while global electrolyser deployment on sited sub-20 USD/MWh power brings PEM hydrogen power to about 2.2 times the grid at 300 billion USD and 1.9 times at 1 trillion USD (2.7 and 2.3 for the hydrogen engine), with a carbon reduction of roughly 85 percent (6.8-fold) against grid-power production. Grid parity is not purchasable at any budget. On-site supply is an access and depth product; most current investment targets the wrong term. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.08170 |
| By: | Duso, Tomaso; Bernhardt, Lea; Piechucka, Joanna |
| Abstract: | We discuss the main Theories of Harm in EU merger control and their evolution since the 1990s. We present stylised facts and trends using data extracted from EU merger decisions by natural language processing tools. EU merger policy has adapted over time, both in terms of legislation and theories of harm, as well as in terms of the investigative tools and evidence used. The introduction of the new Merger Regulation in 2004, which led to a change in the substantive test, also brought about significant changes in the use of Theories of Harm. Unilateral theories are now used more frequently and have developed further, in particular in relation to the assessment of closeness of competition. Non-horizontal conglomerate and vertical Theories of Harm focusing on foreclosure issues are now much more common and are a standard tool in most in-depth investigations. More novel Theories of Harm related to innovation and digital markets have been developed and implemented since the 2010’s. While market shares remain a central tool for merger assessment, the use of internal documents has increased, accompanied by the use of quantitative tools. With respect to Commission interventions, structural remedies are used more frequently, although behavioural remedies are also increasingly deployed, especially in Phase II. |
| Keywords: | Innovation; Merger control; Foreclosure; Coordinated effects; Unilateral effects; Merger remedies; Theory of Harm; Ecosystem |
| JEL: | K21 L4 |
| Date: | 2024–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:19237 |
| By: | Nuño-Ledesma, José G. |
| Abstract: | England recently banned volume-based promotions of foods high in fat, sugar, or salt. When these promotions are used to induce market segmentation, removing them can lead to counterintuitive outcomes and frustrate policy goals. To illustrate how, I use a standard nonlinear pricing model where a single-product seller serves two types of buyers. Without regulation, the seller distorts consumption down for low-preference consumers. After regulation; if the seller serves low-types, the strategic under-provision of quantity is not necessary, reducing consumption for high-type buyers but increasing consumption for low-types. When the seller does not serve low-types consumption by high-types remains steady. |
| Keywords: | Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaea26:404571 |
| By: | Schwartz, Carmit; Diewert, W. Erwin; Fox, Kevin J. |
| Abstract: | This paper provides methodologies for evaluating consumer benefits of infrastructure services. We define benefit measures for consumers and, using general principles from the index number literature, derive alternative first and second order approximations to these measures under the assumption of fixed prices for market goods and services. We describe how the benefit measures and their associated approximations can be used in quantifying the economic benefits when prices are allowed to change endogenously as the provision of infrastructure services changes. Under quite nonrestrictive assumptions, a measure of welfare change is also derived. |
| Keywords: | Consumer benefits; infrastructure services; first order approximation; second order approximation; flexible functional forms; index number theory |
| JEL: | C43 D61 H41 H43 H54 |
| Date: | 2025–10–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eoe:escoed:escoe-dp-2025-15 |
| By: | Redd, Shawn |
| Abstract: | Consumer decisions about regulated facilities — child care centers, nursing homes, surgical centers, aviation operators — are overwhelmingly guided by public star ratings and user reviews. These reputation signals, while widely accessible, are opinion-based, subject to solicitation and management by the reviewed entity, and structurally disconnected from the mandatory government records that document licensing, inspection, enforcement, and safety outcomes. This paper describes the Consumer Z Score™, a composite metric that audits an entity's public reputation against its official government record and surfaces divergence between the two. We describe the four-layer data architecture, the ten-point scoring methodology, the records-layer grading system (A–F), and the design principles that maintain analytical independence. The methodology is applied to a database of 166, 000+ US facilities across eleven regulated industries. We argue that the systematic divergence between reviews and records — measurable across verticals — represents an information asymmetry harmful to consumer welfare, and that surfacing it requires a methodology distinct from both review aggregation and regulatory reporting |
| Keywords: | consumer protection, reputation auditing, government records, information asymmetry, facility safety, review integrity, composite scoring |
| JEL: | O1 |
| Date: | 2026–07–27 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:130357 |
| By: | Camille Naudy; Mehdi Guelmamen; Maëlis Renault |
| Abstract: | Transferring investment risk to a private delegatee is frequently advocated as a means of accelerating the construction of public infrastructure. Yet its effectiveness remains ambiguous: an operator that finances the asset has a direct interest in completing it quickly, but also bears a financing cost that a publicly funded operator does not. In France, fibre deployment in commercially unattractive territories is entrusted to Public Initiative Networks, whose delegating authorities choose between arrangements that retain investment responsibility and arrangements that transfer it. Using a quarterly panel of 56 networks observed from 2018 to 2026, constructed from the regulator’s commune-level open data, we investigate whether this choice is associated with the pace at which networks cover their territories. Our econometric analysis, based on a measure of deployment effort normalised by the remaining stock of connectable premises and on randomisation inference at the network level, yields two key findings. First, networks transferring investment responsibility cover their residual territory 4.6 percentage points faster per quarter, roughly thirty percent above the sample mean and some fifteen months in the date at which a territory is substantially served. Second, the association is concentrated among small and medium-sized networks and attenuates among large regional consortia, suggesting that the layering of governance across tiers of local government dilutes the incentives contractual form is meant to create. These findings provide new insights into the organisational design of subsidised infrastructure programmes, suggesting that the contractual architecture through which public money is spent deserves attention alongside its amount and its targeting. |
| Keywords: | public service delegation; incomplete contracts; fibre broadband; investment risk; infrastructure deployment |
| JEL: | L96 L33 H54 D23 R58 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ulp:sbbeta:2026-26 |
| By: | Wdowin, Julia; Coyle, Diane |
| Abstract: | Shadow prices provide estimates of the economic contribution of capital assets (goods and services) to social welfare. They differ from exchange values in that they aim to incorporate the economic value of externalities associated with some assets. As the revised SNA25 standard explicitly recognises renewable energy resources as economic assets, this paper demonstrates an empirical methodology for estimating the shadow value of wind as a renewable energy asset, and provides estimates of the annual asset shadow value for onshore wind in the UK between 2009 and 2023. The estimates incorporate the value of avoided carbon emissions as a service wind energy provides. The estimated annual shadow asset values are much larger than market price equivalent asset values. While these estimates should be treated with caution due to a number of methodological choices involved, they signal the likely underestimation of the contribution of wind energy to social welfare. The paper concludes by discussing methodological assumptions and data needs for estimating shadow values. The paper provides a modest empirical contribution, whilst methodologically consistent with ONS natural capital accounting for feasible implementation. |
| Keywords: | shadow prices; natural capital accounting; wind; renewable energy; asset valuation; welfare |
| JEL: | D60 D62 E01 Q40 Q51 Q56 |
| Date: | 2026–07–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eoe:escoed:escoe-dp-2026-08 |
| By: | Magesan, Arvind; Morales, Juan S.; Muço, Arieda |
| Abstract: | We study how legal threats to social media platforms shape online political communication. We exploit the sharp implementation of a 2020 Turkish law that required social media companies to establish local offices and provide user data to the government on request. Assembling a panel of over 700 Twitter users and 7 million posts, we use a differences-in-differences design to compare dissenters, individuals publicly critical of the reform when announced, to other groups unlikely to be affected, such as celebrities. We find that dissenters and political exiles post 15-20 percent fewer tweets following implementation, and engagement with their content falls sharply. These short-run chilling effects emerge despite limited platform compliance, indicating that anticipated enforcement risk, rather than actual enforcement, drives the effect. In the long run, the chilling effects dissipate. Our findings suggest that states can govern online speech indirectly, by regulating platforms rather than users, but that such effects may be self-limiting in the absence of visible enforcement. |
| Date: | 2026–08–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:j4hb8_v1 |
| By: | Andrea Gentilini |
| Abstract: | EU financial regulation obliges supervised entities to report transaction-level, position-level and portfolio-level data at a granularity unmatched in any other regulatory domain. National Competent Authorities (NCAs) have begun converting these flows into Data-Driven Supervision (DDS): reproducible indicators, composite risk scores and triage pathways that allocate scarce supervisory capacity where risk concentrates (Gentilini, 2026a). DDS contributes in an efficient manner to address the fundamental needs of efficient, convergent and consistent supervision, within an architecture that combines a centralised, collegial layer for risk identification and metric design with decentralised, proximity-based application at NCA level (Gentilini, 2026b). This paper argues that the same data, the same indicator logic and the same scoring methodology can — and should — be deployed symmetrically by the entities themselves, as Data-Driven Compliance (DDC): an internal control discipline in which firms compute, monitor and remediate the very indicators their supervisors compute about them. DDC converts regulatory reporting from a terminal cost into a source of compliance assurance, lowers the cost of evidencing compliance, and creates the informational basis for a structured dialogue between entities and NCAs over which data and indicators are fit for purpose. Drawing on case studies across AIFMD, EMIR, MiFIR, MMFR and SFTR reporting — anchored in ESMA’s Data Quality Engagement Framework for the provision of data and follow-up on data quality issues — the paper formalises the DDC construct mathematically and concludes with a single actionable recommendation: ESMA should adopt dedicated Guidelines under Article 16 of its founding Regulation making it mandatory for NCAs to require supervised entities to develop and regularly use the indicator-based controls that constitute ESMA’s Data Quality Engagement Framework, to monitor their outcomes and resolve the issues they flag, and — only where issues were flagged — to report annually to their NCA on the issues identified and their resolution. The proposal is framed as simplification and burden reduction, not as new substantive obligation. |
| Keywords: | data-driven supervision; data-driven compliance; supervisory convergence; regulatory reporting; ESMA Guidelines; data quality; EMIR; MiFIR; AIFMD; SFTR; MMFR. |
| JEL: | C53 E37 G21 O17 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:baf:cbafwp:cbafwp26283 |
| By: | Enriques, Luca; Nigro, Casimiro A.; Tröger, Tobias |
| Abstract: | European debates on competitiveness increasingly treat corporate law as a lever to help innovative firms scale. The European Commission's Proposal for a new "28th regime" seeks to introduce an optional, EU-wide corporate legal form designed, inter alia, to facilitate the cross-border scaling of innovative firms. A central instrument of the Proposal is the use of model articles of association to be adopted through future implementing acts. This Article argues that, while standardised articles may ease incorporation and lower drafting costs for ordinary unlisted firms, they fall short for VC-backed companies-the very cases that motivated the initiative. Building on prior work on venture capital contracting under mandatory corporate law, we identify four shortcomings. First, the architecture is incomplete: the Proposal omits a model shareholder agreement, even though effective VC contracting depends on the interaction between articles of association and shareholder arrangements. Second, the drafting process is overly generalist and unlikely to yield genuinely VC-specific templates. Third, the Proposal's fairness-oriented logic risks producing terms that clash with the asymmetric, statecontingent structures typical of VC deals. Fourth, the legal protection offered by the template is limited, focusing on formation-stage effects while leaving subsequent judicial intervention unconstrained. We propose four adjustments: introduce a model shareholders' agreement; create a dedicated VC drafting track; abandon fairness as the organising principle for VC templates; and provide a robust safe harbour covering both ex ante design and ex post enforcement. |
| Keywords: | 28th Regime, Entrepreneurship, EU Company Law, EU Inc., Innovation, Private Ordering, Startups, Venture Capital |
| JEL: | G38 K22 L26 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:lawfin:342486 |
| By: | Martino, Edoardo; Parchimowicz, Katarzyna |
| Abstract: | We investigate the hurdles to the effective implementation of sustainable banking regulation. We argue that existing approaches rest on an implicit assumption of verifiable asset quality, which is inconsistent with the informational structure of banking. Accordingly, we develop an analytical framework centred on structural asset opacity and information asymmetry: banks operate through opaque balance sheets and possess superior information about asset quality relative to both markets and supervisors. This opacity generates moral hazard in the asset classification when regulatory incentives tied to 'green' or 'brown' labels induce strategic misrepresentation and adverse selection. We recast the main regulatory tools proposed in the literature. The analysis shows that incorporating sustainability objectives into prudential requirements, particularly capital regulation, is prone to distortion under conditions of unverifiable information, while supervisory tools remain constrained by their reliance on bank-generated data. We advance an alternative approach based on mandatory contractual mechanisms embedded in lending relationships. Properly designed and supervised, these private law tools operate as sorting devices that differentiate between green and brown activities without requiring full information about asset quality. |
| Keywords: | bank capital, green transition, information asymmetry, bank supervision, regulatory private law |
| JEL: | G21 K22 K23 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:lawfin:342485 |
| By: | Seim, Katja; Vitorino, Maria Ana |
| Abstract: | This paper empirically investigates the add-on or “drip" pricing behavior of firms. We present a model in which consumers purchase a base product and, with some probability, an add-on product from the same firm, but are not necessarily attentive to their possible need for the add-on product. We show that a loss leader pricing strategy emerges whereby firms price the base product below, and the add-on above, standalone pricing levels. We test the implications of the model in the Portuguese market for driving instruction where students frequently pay for repeat driving tests and additional lessons upon failing their initial test. Relying on a detailed, nationwide data set on student characteristics and preferences, school attributes including fees and costs, and market demographics for a cross-section of local markets with differing numbers of school competitors, we find evidence in support of the model predictions. Most notably, prices for the base course of instruction, but not the add-on repeat courses, decline in the number of competitors a firm faces. We complement these results with survey evidence on possible sources of consumer naivete that the observational data do not speak to. The survey suggests that at least one quarter of students are inattentive to repeat fees when making their school choice, driven both by an underestimation of fail propensities and an unawareness of the price of a repeat test. |
| Date: | 2024–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:19258 |
| By: | Lachhab, Rania; Bruno, Ellen |
| Abstract: | Water banking has gained increasing policy attention as a means to mitigate drought risk and enhance long-term water security, yet assessing its economic value remains challenging. We estimate the value of groundwater storage with a hedonic analysis of the Kern Water Bank in California, which created spatial variation in access to storage based on whether a parcel was located within a participating water district. Using a dataset of agricultural land transactions from Kern County, CA and surrounding areas spanning 1984 to 2021, we find that access to the Kern Water Bank meaningfully increased land values, with a 15% increase in the per-acre price of parcels within participating water districts relative to those outside following the start of the bank. These findings underscore the substantial economic benefits of intertemporal water reallocation, with policy implications for agricultural regions facing growing water scarcity and climate variability. |
| Keywords: | Resource/Energy Economics and Policy |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaea26:404731 |