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DIW Discussion Papers 1357 / 2014
This paper investigates to what extent the R&D behavior of manufacturing companies was influenced by the 2008/09 crisis. Based on a broad official data set for German manufacturing companies, only a few companies that engaged in R&D during 2008 gave it up in the following year. Some companies even started R&D during crisis. R&D expenditures declined in 2009 compared to 2008, but expanded in 2010. The ...
2014| Alexander Eickelpasch
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DIW Discussion Papers 1353 / 2014
We analyze the role of public support in the financing pattern of R&D in German SMEs and their assessment of financing conditions in the context of other framework conditions for innovation. In Germany, there is a diversity of overall well-funded technology-neutral and technology-specific programs providing grants to R&D and innovation projects. Different types of SMEs access public funding for R&D ...
2014| Heike Belitz, Anna Lejpras
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DIW Discussion Papers 1333 / 2013
This paper studies the impact of credit rating agency (CRA) announcements on the value of the Euro and the yields of French, Italian, German and Spanish long-term sovereign bonds during the culmination of the Eurozone debt crisis in 2011-2012. The employed GARCH models show that CRA downgrade announcements negatively affected the value of the Euro currency and also increased its volatility. Downgrading ...
2013| Christopher F. Baum, Margarita Karpava, Dorothea Schäfer, Andreas Stephan
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DIW Discussion Papers 1331 / 2013
We evaluate the impact of M&A activity on the growth of R&D spending and R&D intensity of 265 acquiring firms and 133 merger targets between 1990 and 2009. We use different matching techniques to construct separate control groups for acquirers and targets and use appropriate difference-in-difference estimation methods to single out the causal effect of mergers on R&D growth and intensity. We find that ...
2013| Florian Szücs
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DIW Discussion Papers 1330 / 2013
We study the effect of a merger in a dynamic high-technology industry-the videogame market- which is characterized by frequent introduction of new products. To assess the impact of the merger between two large specialist retailers in the UK, we perform a difference-in-differences analysis comparing the price evolution of the merging parties to that of their 7 major competitors on an original sample ...
2013| Luca Aguzzoni, Elena Argentesi, Paolo Buccirossi, Lorenzo Ciari, Tomaso Duso, Massimo Tognoni, Cristiana Vitale
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DIW Discussion Papers 1323 / 2013
Previous work has shown that state-level antitrust enforcement activity may have impacts on entry and relocation behavior by U.S. firms. Significant state-level antitrust activity may be an indicator of a perceived adverse business environment and it is found to deter establishment entry, particularly for larger firms in the retail and wholesale sectors. An obvious question is whether establishment ...
2013| Robert M. Feinberg, Thomas A. Husted, Florian Szücs
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DIW Discussion Papers 1322 / 2013
We study the degree of agglomeration of acquisition activity within clusters of temporal, geographic and industrial proximity based on almost 600,000 individual transactions. The findings indicate that significant clustering occurs in time and across industries, while the results on geographic clustering are mixed. This supports the view that merger waves are mostly driven by neoclassical motives. ...
2013| Florian Szücs
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DIW Discussion Papers 1321 / 2013
We quantify externalities on profitability and market shares of competing firms in oligopolistic markets through the transition from an n to an n - 1 player oligopoly after a merger. Competitors are identified via the European Commission's market investigations and our methodology allows us to distinguish the externality due to the change in market structure from the merger effect. We obtain results ...
2013| Klaus Gugler, Florian Szücs
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DIW Discussion Papers 1310 / 2013
This paper empirically evaluates the price effects of the merger of two major book retail chains in the UK: Waterstone's and Ottakar's. We employ differences-in-differences techniques and use a rich dataset containing monthly scanner data information on a sample of 200 books sold in 60 stores in 50 different local markets for a period of four years around the merger. Since retail mergers may have either ...
2013| Luca Aguzzoni, Elena Argentesi, Lorenzo Ciari, Tomaso Duso, Massimo Tognoni
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DIW Discussion Papers 1283 / 2013
Nonparametric efficiency analysis has become a widely applied technique to support industrial benchmarking as well as a variety of incentive- based regulation policies. In practice such exercises are often plagued by incomplete knowledge about the correct specifications of inputs and outputs. Simar and Wilson (2001) and Schubert and Simar (2011) propose restriction tests to support such specification ...
2013| Anne Neumann, Maria Nieswand, Torben Schubert