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Modern state-owned firms' performance: An empirical analysis of productivity, market power and innovation

In sectors of general interests, the economic activity of the state decreased over decades as a consequence of privatisation and liberalisation. Recently, local governments began to remunicipalise in the energy and water sector, thereby creating a new and modern generation of state-owned firms.  These firms, however, differ in organisation and production environment from the state monopolists of...

Testing the Superstar Firm Hypothesis

The superstar firms model provides a compelling explanation for two simultaneously occurring phenomena: the rise of concentration in industries and the fall of labor shares. Our empirical analysis confirms two of the underlying assumptions of the model: the market share increases and the labor share decreases with increasing firm-level total factor productivity, providing support for the superstar ...

Difference-in-Differences to Identify Causal Effects of COVID-19 Policies

Policymakers have implemented a wide range of non-pharmaceutical interventions to fight the spread of COVID-19. Variation in policies across jurisdictions and over time strongly suggests a difference-in-differences (DD) research design to estimate causal effects of counter-COVID measures. We discuss threats to the validity of these DD designs and make recommendations about how researchers can avoid ...

Green Guarantee Pension

The Green Guarantee Pension is designed to ensure that people who have worked the majority of their lives, brought up children, looked after other people or have acquired other rights under the statutory pension insurance (Gesetzliche Rentenversicherung) receive a pension in old age that is above the means-tested basic pension. The Guarantee Pension increases pension entitlements within the...

Trajectories of Multiple Subjective Well-Being Facets Across Old Age: The Role of Health and Personality

Subjective well-being is often characterized by average stability across old age, but individual differencesare substantial and not yet fully understood. This study targets physical and cognitive health andpersonality as individual difference characteristics and examines their unique and interactive roles forlevel and change in a number of different facets of subjective well-being. We make use of medicaldiagnoses, ...

Partial Retirement, Financial Student Aid, and Labor Market Responses: Empirical Evidence from Germany

Reluctant to Reform? A Note on Risk-Loving Politicians and Bureaucrats

From a political economy perspective, politicians often fail to imple-ment structural reforms. In this contribution we investigate if the resistance toreform is based on the differences in the risk preferences of voters, politicians,and bureaucrats. Based on three surveys among the German electorate, 175members of the Federal German Parliament and 106 officials from Germanministries, this is not the ...

Airbnb and Rents: Evidence from Berlin

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...

Physician effects in antibiotic prescribing: Evidence from physician exits

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...

Determinants and effects of mergers and acquisitions: Evidence from drug projects in the diabetes market

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....