Publikationen der Abteilung Unternehmen und Märkte

Airbnb and Rental Markets: Evidence from Berlin

VAT Pass-through and Competition: Evidence from the Greek Islands

We examine how competition affects VAT pass-through in isolated oligopolistic markets as defined by the Greek islands. Using daily gasoline prices and a difference-in-differences methodology, we investigate how changes in VAT rates are passed through to consumers in islands with different market structure. We show that pass-through increases with competition, going from 50% in monopoly to around 80% ...

Revisiting the Relatedness Hypothesis: The Impact of Merger Relatedness on Acquiring and Rival Firm Value  

Despite intuitive appeal, empirical evidence supporting the relatedness hypothesis has been scant, as it has not been established that related acquisitions generally outperform unrelated acquisitions. In considering the impact of merger relatedness on not only acquiring-firm value – as is standard in the relatedness literature – but also on non-merging rival firm value, we offer an alternative perspective ...

Trade Liberalization along the Firm Size Distribution: The Case of the EU-South Korea FTA

Leading theories suggest that amongst continuing exporters, lower variable trade costs should boost exports of smaller firms by the same or greater percentage rate than larger firms. However, investigating the impact of the deep EU-South Korea FTA with French customs data, we find robust evidence to the contrary. Applying a triple-difference framework, we report that the FTA increased sales in the ...

A Lasting Crisis Affects R&D Decisions of Smaller Firms: The Greek Experience

We use the prolonged Greek crisis as a case study to understand how a lasting economic shock affects the innovation strategies of firms in economies with moderate innovation activities. Adopting the 3-stage CDM model, we explore the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity for different size groups of Greek manufacturing firms during the prolonged crisis. At the first stage, we find that the ...

Remunicipalization, Corporatization, and Outsourcing: The Performance of Public-Sector Firms after Reorganization

This article investigates the impact of reorganization on productivity within public-sector firms addressing the owners' composition, the board-management relationship, and the management's decision to outsource activities. Considering a large panel of 2,325 German municipally owned utilities between 2003 and 2014, firm-level productivity is estimated based on a control function approach. Contrary ...

Technological Relatedness and Industrial Transformation: Introduction to the Special Issue

This article introduces eleven research articles that connect concepts of technological relatedness and diffusion with the transformation of industrial and innovation systems. These studies focus on the role of knowledge spillovers, regional variations in innovation and performance, and the evolution of new technologies, such as green and digital technologies. Regional capabilities and ability to diversify ...

Local Energy Markets

In current power markets, the bulk of electricity is sold wholesale and transported to consumers via long-distance transmission lines. Recently, decentralized local energy markets have evolved, often as isolated networks based on solar generation. We analyze strategic pricing, investment, and welfare in local energy markets. We show that local energy markets yield competitive equilibrium prices and ...

Pandemic Depression: COVID-19 and the Mental Health of the Self-Employed

We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-employed people’s mental health. Using representative longitudinal survey data from Germany, we reveal differential effects by gender: whereas self-employed women experienced a substantial deterioration in their mental health, self-employed men displayed no significant changes up to early 2021. Financial losses are important in explaining these ...

The Influence of Start-Up Motivation on Entrepreneurial Performance

Predicting entrepreneurial development based on individual and business-related characteristics is a key objective of entrepreneurship research. In this context, we investigate whether the motives of becoming an entrepreneur influence the subsequent entrepreneurial development. In our analysis, we examine a broad range of business outcomes including survival and income, as well as job creation, and ...