This article analyzes the interaction of EU competition, consumer and data protection law in the digital economy. We compare the objectives, rules and enforcement structures of these legal regimes, and we discuss market failures that justify regulatory intervention in digital markets. In particular, the Facebook investigations in Germany and Italy are selected as a case study. The Bundeskartellamt's investigations are remarkable, being the first in which an exploitative abuse of dominance involving a digital platform has been decided under competition law. These we compare with their Italian counterpart, where the AGCM has recently sanctioned Facebook for behavior similar to that investigated in Germany. Yet, the Italian case has been decided under consumer, rather than competition law. This shows the regulatory dilemma faced by European antitrust authorities, which are currently struggling to find a solution to the market failures arising in digital markets.

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This study investigates the existence of an optimal capital structure for small and medium enterprise (SME) hotels through the analysis of the relationship between financing decisions and financial performance in a large sample of Italian hotel SMEs. The results show that hotel SMEs face an optimal capital structure that allows them to maximize returns to investors, while instead having both too little and too much debt reduces their financial performance. This notwithstanding, we show that hotel SMEs are not particularly concerned with optimizing their capital structure, and their funding behavior is deeply connected with the availability of internally available funds, a typical pecking order behavior, and they result extremely slow in converging toward their optimal level of leverage so that they could improve their performance by adopting a more sophisticated financial strategy.

We investigate the capital structure and the dynamic behaviour of firms' debt ratios in a large sample of companies from 52 countries. Our findings support a complex view of capital structure decisions, with firm, macroeconomic and institutional factors interacting in the determination of both the optimal leverage and the adjustment process towards it. This results in a complex non‐linear dynamic behaviour of firms' debt‐to‐equity ratios. These interactions contribute for almost two thirds of the explained heterogeneity of the target leverage, and around one third of the speed of adjustment towards the optimal capital structure. Overall, our results suggest that market timing and pecking order arguments prevail in the short run, while a dynamic trade‐off mechanism with costly readjustment matters mainly in the long run.