Thema Unternehmen

Venture Capital in Diabetes: A Yes to Big Hits, a No to Competition

Venture capital (VC) is often seen as an instrumental tool that allows many start-ups to pursue innovation with the potential to shake-up current markets and/or to replace incumbents. Using a highly granular, project-level dataset from preclinical diabetes R&D, this paper shows that VCs actively steer the direction of R&D and streamline activities of research focused firms (pipeline firms)...

State Aid for Environmental Protection and Energy – Focus on Electro-intensive Firms

The European Commission commissioned an international consortium including the DIW Berlin with a background study on State aid in the field of environmental protection and energy. The results of the study are meant to support the Commission in the revision of the EU Guidelines on State aid for environmental protection and energy (EEAG). One key focus of the study was to assess the current rules...

Emergency Aid for the Self-Employed in the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Flash in the Pan?

The self-employed are among those facing the highest probability of strong income losses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments in many countries introduced support programs to support the self-employed, including the German federal government, which approved a €50bn emergency aid program at the end of March 2020 offering one-off lump-sum payments of up to €15,000 to those facing...

What Drives Green Capabilities? Evidence from German Firm-level Data

Germany is leading in green competitiveness of its product exports. Deploying the green economic complexity methodology using German AFiD firm-level micro data, this study seeks to analyze explanatory variables for this trend such as green R&D subsidies and subnational density of related green technologies in the light of path dependencies in firms accumulation of green capabilities. It...

Soforthilfe für Selbstständige wirkt vor allem positiv, wenn sie rasch gewährt wird

Selbstständige erleiden in der Covid-19-Pandemie besonders häufig Einkommensverluste. Zu ihrer Unterstützung hat der Bund verschiedene Programme mit Liquiditätshilfen aufgelegt. Im Frühjahr 2020 startete der Bund die Soforthilfe, ein Programm, das für die von Umsatzrückgängen betroffenen Selbstständigen Einmalzahlungen von bis zu 15.000 Euro vorsah....

The rise of common ownership: Europe vs the US

Common ownership - when an investor holds shares in two companies - has recently attracted significant attention from policy-makers and researchers, studying mainly US firms. European firms, however, are different as top investors with large stakes, like governments, founding families and foundations are much more prevalent. This paper takes a well-known common ownership measure derived from...

Common Ownership Patterns in the European Banking Sector – The Impact of the Financial Crisis

We provide a description of ownership patterns in the top 25 European banks for the period 2003–2015, where we especially focus on the global financial crisis. Investment managers, such as Blackrock, are dominant in terms of number of block holdings in different banks, maintaining fairly stable “common ownership” networks throughout our sample. However, the financial crisis led...

Broadband and Productivity: Structural Estimates for Germany

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 ...

The Productivity Puzzle in Business Services

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 ...

FuE-intensive Industrien und wissensintensive Dienstleistungen im internationalen Vergleich