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As the sharing economy emerges in numerous industries, Uber’s introduction in the taxi industry has entailed commotion, controversy and uncertainty. The previously stable and heavily regulated taxi industry’s disruption has been the subject of plenty of studies, investigating how the taxi industry is influenced by the emergence of Uber and possible other ridesharing services. This paper intends to substantiate as well as extend existing literature, as it strives to quantify how taxi companies and the taxi drivers’ labor market have been influenced by the extraordinary emerged competition. Deploying a Difference-in-Differences framework, this paper examines the evolution of the taxi industry in the 50 biggest MSAs in the United States. Although the results state that the number of active taxi companies, the number of traditional taxi drivers and their annual earnings decrease significantly, the existing literature declares that Uber’s emergence entails an increase in consumer surplus. Therefore, provided appropriate regulations, Uber’s emergence, or the emergence of ridesharing in general, will be a beneficial disruption of the taxi industry and enhance welfare.

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In the last decade, economists have raised concerns about a slowdown in productivity growth in numerous developed countries. The phenomenon named the productivity puzzle has also occurred in Belgium. This thesis adds to the discussion on productivity in Belgium in three ways. First, Belgium is known to be an economically diverse country, so the thesis will look in detail into the differences between the three regions Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels. Second, the latest techniques in productivity estimation are applied on an extensive micro dataset of Belgian firms. Several semi-parametric regression approaches are implemented and compared, whereby productivity is estimated at the firm level. The main method of analysis was suggested by Collard-Wexler and De Loecker (2016). The granular approach makes it possible to break down aggregate productivity and look at distributional aspects. Finally, aggregate productivity growth is broken down by region using the Melitz and Polanec decomposition (2015).