This paper provides novel evidence of patent-induced shocks on firm survival, growth, and productivity, and how innovation shocks impact worker compensation and employment prospects. Using linked employer-employee data with newly linked German firm data and web-scraped patent documents, we leverage quasi-random assignment of patent applications to examiners. Patent allowance reduces market exit and increases firm productivity. This induces positive wage responses. On average, workers capture roughly 50 cents of every euro increase in revenue. Wage gains are strongest for lower-wage jobs, in particular for administrative staff and skilled and unskilled manual and service employees. We present evidence that this result is likely driven by institutional features and the organizational structure of firms.

(joint with Afroza Alam)

The German Socio-Economic Panel Study is a representative panel study for the German population, collecting data on a broad variety of topics of everyday life, including general well-being, household composition, educational aspirations and educational status, income and occupational biographies, leisure time activities, housing, health, political orientation and more. With its long-running panel structure, the breadth of topics and the representative nature of the data, the SOEP has become a central resource for quantitative research in the social sciences in Germany.

The Berlin IO Day is a one-day workshop supported by the Berlin's leading academic institutions, including DIW Berlin, ESMT Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Technische Universität Berlin. The aim is to create an international forum for high quality research in Industrial Organization in the heart of Berlin, one of Europe's most vibrant and intellectually lively cities.

24. 3.: 10 a.m.-1 p.m.

In modern empirical macroeconomics, structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) are routinely used to trace out the responses of macroeconomic variables to structural shocks. These structural shocks could be monetary policy shocks, tax shocks, oil price shocks, and many others. For example, central banks use SVARs to analyse the effects of interest movements on the economy. A crucial step in this model class is identification, meaning the step from pure correlation among variables towards causal statements. One way to achieve identification is the use of external instruments or proxies. These proxies are potentially noisy measurements of the shocks of interest. In this Masterclass we are going to investigate methods to include proxies in SVARs, so-called Proxy VARs.

Several issues related to Proxy VARs will be discussed. First, we are going to compare the standard VAR approach to a popular alternative, local projections. Second, we will investigate Bayesian approaches for estimation. Third, we are going to investigate the role of heteroskedasticity in this model class. Fourth, we are going to illustrate some of these issues using real data related to the global oil market and US monetary policy.

Industrial strategies are not only about the development of new technologies. They also need to ensure conducive conditions for technology diffusion across the economy to unlock productivity potential. This panel draws on recent OECD research on conditions and policy levers that enable AI technology uptake and diffusion across firms. Building on this evidence, the panel will discuss key elements needed to promote AI diffusion and realise the associated productivity gains, particularly among SMEs. 

Please register here. 

05.05.: 10 a.m.-1 p.m.

Public debt has reached historically high levels in many advanced economies and continues to grow at an unprecedented pace. This development has brought questions of fiscal sustainability, macroeconomic stability, and the appropriate conduct of monetary and fiscal policy to the forefront of policy debates worldwide.

This five-lecture course investigates the mechanisms and conditions under which large public debt gives rise to macroeconomic instability, using dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models as a unified analytical framework. Within this framework, we examine the constraints, trade-offs, and credibility issues faced by monetary authorities when public debt is both large and persistent. We analyze alternative regimes of monetary–fiscal interaction and assess how different forms of policy coordination can stabilize public debt dynamics, with particular emphasis on their implications for inflation and output growth.

The course devotes special attention to the challenges of fiscal policy coordination in a monetary union, where national fiscal authorities operate under a common monetary policy, as in the European Union. Building on these theoretical insights, we then confront the models with empirical evidence, highlighting the role of fiscal–monetary interactions in shaping inflation dynamics over the postwar period. Finally, we apply the framework to contemporary policy challenges, discussing how monetary and fiscal authorities in the United States and the euro area can respond to the legacy of the large public debt accumulated in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The starting point of this course is a self-contained introduction to Bayesian estimation and inference. We proceed with the Bayesian estimation of reduced-form vector autoregressions, discussing popular families of prior distributions and how to sample from the resulting posterior distributions.

Next, we move from reduced-form to structural VARs. We show how Bayesian inference can be implemented for several popular identification schemes.

In the final step, we use functional VARs to model the dynamic of cross-sectional densities. The last part of the course is devoted to the Bayesian estimation of DSGE models: likelihood evaluation with Kalman filter, posterior sampling using a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm and sequential Monte Carlo algorithm.

The 16th International German Socio-Economic Panel User Conference (SOEP2026) will be held in Berlin from July 8 to 9, 2026 at the Quadriga Campus. 

The conference provides researchers who use the SOEP with the opportunity to present and discuss their work with their peers. This includes users of the SOEP part of the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF), LIS/LWS data, and SOEP-IS, as well as users of the migration samples (IAB-SOEP, IAB-BAMF-SOEP). 

We particularly welcome contributions addressing meta-science, robustness, replicability, reproducibility, and open science. This includes, but is not limited to, studies that compare and/or combine different populations or samples, analyses, designs, methods, and time periods. In addition, we encourage submissions beyond this thematic focus, especially those making use of the longitudinal features of SOEP, as well as submissions on survey methodology and cross-national comparative analysis.