Firms and Markets Department Events

Abstract:   Our research question is to what extent does the familiarity with the testing environment impact the relative performance of boys and girls in standardized testing. We use an RCT-design on the full population of students in Grade 6 and 10 across several subjects in the Region of Madrid (Spain). This standardized test was either "Externally" administered, meaning that teachers ...

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This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Charlotte will summarize the methodology of textmining for information retrieval, different techniques, advantages and disadvantages. Primarily, she will be discussing the textmining procedure she undertook to develop and verify a database about the merger level characteristics and Commission ...

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This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract:   There is an ongoing debate both in academia and in policy circles about the effects of takeovers of small, young firms by large incumbents in innovative industries. Many argue that such takeovers are anticompetitive and harm innovation by killing off nascent competition. ...

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The tremendous growth of digital transactions has profoundly affected the way we interact, opening vast opportunities to improve our lives. Consumers have benefited from an unprecedented proliferation of new services and products that previously were simply too costly to be developed and marketed to customers. These digital interactions create vast amounts of data. While firms are already using ...

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This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract:   Antibiotic resistance is a severe problem within our current health systems. One of the main strategies to combat the rise of antibiotic resistance is to improve individual physicians' antibiotic prescribing practices. However, this strategy requires that differences in ...

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Abstract:  User generated content is increasingly substituting content created by professionals. Local news that is generated by citizen journalists could be a promising way of supporting the struggling newspaper industry by reducing costs for professional journalists. We study a network of 122 local Austrian newspapers operating a hybrid model of citizen and professional journalism. We first ...

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This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract:   Cities worldwide have regulated the peer-to-peer short-term rental market claiming that those markets remove apartments from the long-term housing market, causing an increase in rents. However, at the time many of these policies were passed, empirical evidence for or ...

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This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract:  In the last ten years, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) acquired more than 400 companies, predominantly in the technological sector. Competition authorities did not scrutinize most of these transactions, as they did not reach the traditional thresholds, ...

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This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract:  This paper analyzes the relationship between common ownership – when two firms are partially held by the same investor – and markups. Combining firm-level financial data from Europe with ownership data of publicly listed firms, we structurally estimate production ...

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Summary:  This talk will provide a survey of several papers on the theory and practice of experimental design. I will compare different objectives (estimator precision, outcomes of participants, informing policy choice to maximize average outcomes, and informing policy choice to maximize utilitarian welfare), and their implications for experimental design. I will consider heuristic ...

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This event takes place online via Zoom. Abstract:  While the coronavirus spreads around the world, governments are attempting to reduce contagion rates at the expense of negative economic effects. Market expectations have plummeted, foreshadowing the risk of a global economic crisis and mass unemployment. Governments provide huge financial aid programmes to mitigate the expected economic ...

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Abstract:  We study competition between Airbnb and hotel accommodations in Paris in 2017 to assess the welfare implications of Airbnb’s presence on hotels and travelers. The existing literature on the subject exclusively uses across city variation in Airbnb diffusion. Consequently, it does not take into account that the location of an accommodation within a city might be an important ...

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Abstract:  An increasing body of empirical evidence has documented trends to risen concentration, profits, markups, and market power in many industries across the world since the 1980s. Several factors – such as globalisation, digitisation, the increased role of intangible assets and sunk costs, as well as M&A activity and the (under)enforcement of merger control– have been ...

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Abstract:  Trust is thought to be an important driver of economic growth and other economic outcomes. Previous studies suggest that trust may be a combination of risk attitudes, distributional preferences, betrayal aversion, and beliefs about the probability of being reciprocated. We compare the results of a binary trust game to the results of a series of control treatments that remove the ...

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Abstract:   I derive an optimal benefit-based corporate tax rate formula as a function of the public input elasticity of profits and the (net of) tax elasticity of profits. I argue that the existence of the corporate income tax should be justified by the benefit-based view of taxation: firms should pay tax according to the benefits they receive from the use of the public input. I argue that ...

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Abstract:  Antibiotic misuse due to prescribing under diagnostic uncertainty is a leading driver of antibiotic resistance. We investigate the magnitude and mechanisms by which machine learning predictions can enable policies that reduce antibiotic misuse. Building on predictions from administrative data on urinary tract infections in Denmark, we evaluate counterfactual policies that replace ...

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Abstract:  This paper investigates the determinants of ownership changes of drug candidates in one of the most important current pharma markets —the market for diabetes. We in particular look at how do the competitive circumstances, progress in clinical development and radicalness of the drug candidates matter in these decisions. We use newly constructed, very granular dataset tracking ...

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Abstract: Through social interaction in the workplace, coworkers are likely to learn from each other (knowledge spillover) and this may extend the returns to firm-provided training from trained workers onto untrained coworkers. Based on German matched-employer employee data covering the universe of employees we investigate whether unskilled workers derive long-term career benefits if they were ...

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Abstract:   The rise of dominant firms in data driven industries is often credited to their alleged data advantage. Empirical evidence lending support to this conjecture is lacking. In this paper, we show that data as an input into machine learning tasks displays features that favor the hypothesis that data is a source of market power. We study the search result quality for search keywords on ...

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Abstract:   In online commerce, obfuscation strategies by sellers are hypothesized to mislead consumers to their detriment and to the profit of sellers. One such obfuscation strategy is partitioned pricing in which the price is split into a base price and add-on fees. While empirical evidence suggests that partitioned pricing impacts consumer decisions through salience effects, its consumer ...

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