Coles has been found to have misled its supermarket customers over discounts – and could now face hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties.

In a landmark case, Federal Court Justice Michael O'Bryan found 13 out of 14 sample sale tickets examined in the case had not offered genuine discounts, because Coles had not sold the products at a higher price for a reasonable period before promoting them with “Down Down” discounts.

Celso Brunetti, Jeffery H. Harris, Ioannis SpyridopoulosNo, in the mortgage market. Using confidential micro-level data combining mortgage contracts with credit and repayment records for 44 million loans spanning 5,000 bank mergers over nearly three decades, we find no changes to mortgage rates, approval rates, or delinquency rates. Local mortgage markets remain remarkably competitive despite consolidation, averaging over 100 active lenders in each county every post-merger quarter.

We empirically analyse the role of judgement in assigning overall scores by the euro area supervisors as part of the yearly Supervisory Review and Evaluation Process (SREP), which evaluates banks’ risks and sets supervisory actions. We also analyse its role in shaping the drivers of the Pillar 2 capital requirement (P2R) that banks must fulfil. We find that supervisors actively adjust the weight of the components of the overall score to reflect qualitative information, thereby smoothing fluctuations in the final assessment.

This paper studies the impact on cashflows and financial decisions of firms affected by wildfires, focusing on the wildfires that occurred in Portugal in 2017. Using establishment-level data from the hotel industry combined with geospatial information on wildfire proximity and land use, we employ a difference-in-differences approach to study both directly and indirectly affected firms.