Since 2010, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) have acquired more than 400 companies. Competition authorities did not scrutinize most of these transactions and blocked none. This raised concerns that GAFAM acquisitions target potential competitors yet fly under the radar of current merger control due to the features of the digital economy. We empirically study the competitive effects ...
Wealth is very unequally distributed in Germany. To effect a long-term reduction, the new Federal Government could focus on more effectively promoting home ownership, supplementary retirement provision, and other precautionary savings. However, a universal capital endowment could decrease wealth inequality much more rapidly and successfully. In this report, a universal capital endowment of up to 20,000 ...
Once again, we warmly invite you to participate in our survey of SOEP users.This year, we are very curious about your assessments and experiences with our SOEP data, especially your work with specific data sets or samples, as well as the data format of your analysis. With your participation, you contribute significantly to the continuous improvement of our data offering. You can also participate ...
We consider a Green Public Procurement setting where the procurer provides a bid discount to environment-friendly technologies to foster their use. We assume that, before the auction, firms may switch to green technology via a publicly observable costly investment. We show that investment acts as a signaling device. This mitigates the effect of incomplete information on firms’ costs, thereby triggering ...
This study is the first to investigate the interdependence of income inequality and business cycles in Germany over the past 40 years. These fluctuations in income inequality are important because they are decisive for designing effective and targeted structural redistributive and stabilization measures. The results of this study show that income inequality in Germany fluctuates with the business cycle ...
Jonas Jessen, who worked at the Education and Family department, has successfully defended his dissertation at the Freie Universität Berlin. The dissertation with the title "Unintended Consequences and Spill-over Effects of Family Policies: Six Essays in Labour and Family Economics" was supervised by Prof. C. Katharina Spieß (DIW Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin) and Prof. ...
