Using brand-level sales data from Chinese e-commerce platforms, this study examines how geopolitical tensions affect multinational brands operating in China. Merging these sales data with a U.S.–China tension index, we use panel regressions and local projections to show that rising tensions significantly reduce the market share of U.S. brands in China relative to brands from other countries, with the effects persisting for up to 12 months. An event study employing a difference-in-differences framework, centered on brand-specific incidents of political tension with China, reveals similar market share declines among affected brands, highlighting consumer sentiment as a key transmission channel.

This Technical Report documents the construction and coverage of the IWH European Real Estate Index (EREI). Since 2018, we have used machine-learning methods to collect monthly listings of residential real estate available for sale or rent in up to 20 European countries. The Technical Report documents the cleaning and selection process and describes the data regarding coverage, moments, and frequencies to construct the EREI.

In Chapter 1, I combine longitudinal administrative firm-level data from Germany with 8,000 local tax changes for identification to show that local tax hikes (cuts) increase (decrease) the local manufacturing share. Firm-level results reveal that this is due to wage, employment, firm entry, and labor productivity in the service sector being more responsive to a tax shock than in manufacturing. With this evidence in mind, I calibrate a two-sector model with heterogeneous firms and profit tax to show that, owing to different structural parameters, a corporate tax cut disproportionately benefits service firms, contributing to the sectoral reallocation from manufacturing to service. In Chapter 2, we derive a European Herfindahl-Hirschman concentration index from 15 micro-aggregated country datasets. We show that European concentration rose due to a reallocation of economic activity towards large and concentrated industries. Over the same period, productivity gains from an increasing allocative efficiency of the European market accounted for 50% of European productivity growth while markups stayed constant. Using country-industry variation, we show that changes in concentration are positively associated with changes in productivity and allocative efficiency. This holds across most sectors and countries and supports the notion that rising concentration in Europe reflects a more efficient market environment rather than weak competition and rising market power. In chapter 3, We study the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and related policy support on productivity. We employ an extensive micro-distributed exercise to access otherwise unavailable individual data on firm performance and government subsidies. Our cross-country evidence for five EU countries shows that the pandemic led to a significant short-term decline in aggregate productivity and the direct support to firms had only a limited positive effect on productivity developments.

Climate change and inequality are critical and interrelated defining issues for this century. Despite growing empirical evidence on the economic incidence of climate policies and impacts, mainstream model-based assessments are often silent on the interplay between climate change and economic inequality. For example, all the major model comparisons reviewed in IPCC neglect within-country inequalities. Here we fill this gap by presenting a model ensemble of eight large-scale Integrated Assessment Models belonging to different model paradigms and featuring economic heterogeneity. We study the distributional implications of Paris-aligned climate target of 1.5 degree and include different carbon revenue redistribution schemes. Moreover, we account for the economic inequalities resulting from residual and avoided climate impacts. We find that price-based climate policies without compensatory measures increase economic inequality in most countries and across models. However, revenue redistribution through equal per-capita transfers can offset this effect, leading to on average decrease in the Gini index by almost two points. When climate benefits are included, inequality is further reduced, but only in the long term. Around mid-century, the combination of dried-up carbon revenues and yet limited climate benefits leads to higher inequality under the Paris target than in the Reference scenario, indicating the need for further policy measures in the medium term.

We analyze how skill transferability and the local industry mix affect the adjustment costs of workers hit by a trade shock. Using German administrative data and novel measures of economic distance we construct an index of labor market absorptiveness that captures the degree to which workers from a particular industry are able to reallocate into other jobs. Among manufacturing workers, we find that the earnings loss associated with increased import exposure is much higher for those who live in the least absorptive regions. We conclude that the local industry composition plays an important role in the adjustment processes of workers.