We examine the impacts of alcohol sales restrictions on alcohol sales and broader welfare implications. We focus on the role of government alcohol monopolies in an environment where limited alcohol sales are allowed outside of the monopolies. We utilize a reform that relaxed the restriction on alcohol sales outside of the monopoly and smaller changes in alcohol tax rates. We study the impact of the reform on total sales as well as substitution and spillover patterns across product categories and different types of stores. Our results indicate very large substitution between different product categories and also between the state monopoly and private stores. We also find evidence of spillover effects to the sales of more distant product categories that are not directly affected by the reform. The total alcohol consumption does not seem to increase during the reform. These effects entail a welfare loss originating from alcohol sales restrictions.

A strong economic case can be made for public support for research. In this paper, which is work in progress, we focus on expenditure- and income-based tax incentives, which have both been used increasingly in OECD countries and elsewhere since the early 2000s. We use macrodata-based analyses to make three contributions. First, we bring together recently published data on expenditure- and income-based tax incentives regimes within a common empirical framework. Second, we analyze the impacts of income-base tax incentives regimes on R&D activity, as opposed to patent applications. Third, we present an evaluation of the impacts of BEPS Action 5 on the effectiveness of IBR, notably compared to XBR.

I show that public funding significantly improves the financing situation of young firms by exploiting variation in access to public funding under the largest German regional policy scheme. My results based on a shock-based difference-in-differences research design indicate that the probability of experiencing financial constraints decreases by about 10% to 19% for treatment firms relative to control firms, depending on whether the funding instrument is a subsidized loan, a public loan guarantee, or a grant. The effect is heterogeneous not only across instruments but also across capital providers. In addition, I find that public funding is associated with higher employment and revenue growth, as well as higher research and development expenditures and, for recipient firms of grants, higher investment.

Water is an increasingly scarce resource. However, in many multi-family buildings, water is included in the rent and tenants can consume an unlimited amount at a fixed cost, with no monetary incentives for saving water. Using high-frequency data over multiple years and a staggered implementation of apartment-level billing, we investigate the effects of volumetric pricing on hot water use. Our results show that individual billing decreases hot water consumption by 18%. The response is rather immediate and appears to be permanent. Additionally, estimated effects are remarkably homogeneous across different consumption quartiles, apartments with varying characteristics, and days of the week, and evenly distributed between bathroom and kitchen usage. Our cost-benefit analysis indicates that price interventions can cost-effectively reduce the consumption of hot water. Moreover, the effect of individual billing is of an order of magnitude higher than previously estimated effects of non-pecuniary incentives and providing more information about water consumption.