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DIW Discussion Papers 2000 / 2022
This paper sheds new light on the role of communication for cartel formation. Using machine learning to evaluate free-form chat communication among firms in a laboratory experiment, we identify typical communication patterns for both explicit cartel formation and indirect attempts to collude tacitly. We document that firms are less likely to communicate explicitly about price fixing and more likely ...
2022| Maximilian Andres, Lisa Bruttel, Jana Friedrichsen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1998 / 2022
Data is often at the core of digital products and services, especially when related to online advertising. This has made data protection and privacy a major policy concern. When surfing the web, consumers leave digital traces that can be used to build user profiles and infer preferences. We quantify the extent to which Facebook can track web behavior outside of their own platform. The network of engagement ...
2022| Luis Aguiar, Christian Peukert, Maximilian Schäfer, Hannes Ullrich
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DIW Discussion Papers 1988 / 2021
We study the impact of broadband availability on firms’ total factor productivity (TFP) using German firm-level data between 2010 and 2015. We adopt a control function approach to causally identify and separately estimate productivity for 46 two-digit manufacturing and service sectors. Over the sample period, broadband availability, measured by 16 Mbps transmission rates, more than doubled in German ...
2021| Tomaso Duso, Mattia Nardotto, Alexander Schiersch
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DIW Discussion Papers 1987 / 2021
Since 2010, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) have acquired more than 400 companies. Competition authorities did not scrutinize most of these transactions and blocked none. This raised concerns that GAFAM acquisitions target potential competitors yet fly under the radar of current merger control due to the features of the digital economy. We empirically study the competitive effects ...
2021| Pauline Affeldt, Reinhold Kesler
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DIW Discussion Papers 1979 / 2021
Worldwide, the overwhelming majority of large horizontal mergers are cleared by antitrust authorities unconditionally. The presumption seems to be that efficiencies from these mergers are sizeable. We calculate the compensating efficiencies that would prevent a merger from harming consumers for 1,014 mergers affecting 12,325 antitrust markets scrutinized by the European Commission between 1990 and ...
2021| Pauline Affeldt, Tomaso Duso, Klaus Gugler, Joanna Piechucka
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DIW Discussion Papers 1971 / 2021
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the introduction of mandatory face mask usage triggered a heated debate. A major point of debate is whether community use of masks creates a false sense of security that would diminish physical distancing, counteracting any potential direct benefit from masking. We conducted a randomized field experiment in Berlin, Germany, to investigate how masks affect distancing and ...
2021| Gyula Seres, Anna Balleyer, Nicola Cerutti, Jana Friedrichsen, Müge Süer
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DIW Discussion Papers 1965 / 2021
We empirically investigate the relevance of multi-homing in two-sided markets. First, we build a micro-founded structural econometric model that encompasses demand for differentiated products and allows for multi-homing on both sides of the market. We then use an original dataset on the Italian daily newspaper market that includes information on double-homing by readers to estimate readers’ and advertisers’ ...
2021| Pauline Affeldt, Elena Argentesi, Lapo Filistrucchi
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DIW Discussion Papers 1961 / 2021
The existential threat to small businesses, based on their crucial role in the economy, is behind the plethora of scholarly studies in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining the 14 contributions of the special issue on the “Economic Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses,” the paper comprises four parts: a systematic review of the literature on the ...
2021| Maksim Belitski, Christina Guenther, Alexander S. Kritikos, Roy Thurik
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DIW Discussion Papers 1960 / 2021
In Germany, the productivity of professional services, a sector dominated by micro and small firms, declined by 40 percent between 1995 and 2014. This productivity decline also holds true for professional services in other European countries. Using a German firm-level dataset of 700,000 observations between 2003 and 2017, we analyze this largely uncovered phenomenon among professional services, the ...
2021| Alexander S. Kritikos, Alexander Schiersch, Caroline Stiel
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DIW Discussion Papers 1958 / 2021
Human antibiotic consumption is considered the main driver of antibiotic resistance. Reducing human antibiotic consumption without compromising health care quality poses one of the most important global health policy challenges. A crucial condition for designing effective policies is to identify who drives antibiotic treatment decisions, physicians or patient demand. We measure the causal effect of ...
2021| Shan Huang, Hannes Ullrich