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The Concentration in the Investor Market Has Intensified: Eight Questions for Jo Seldeslachts

Changes in Common Ownership of German Companies

Ownership of publicly listed German companies has undergone significant changes in recent years. The aim of this report is to document these trends since 2007 and analyze the extent to which firms that compete in the same product market are owned by the same investors, which is known as common ownership. We show that some large foreign institutional investors have overtaken domestic investors and now ...

Clients Prefer Flat Fee Contracts: Ten Questions to Jo Seldeslachts

Paying by the Hour: The Least Appealing Option for Clients of Lawyers

In this study, we analyze a client’s choice of contract in auctions where Dutch law firms compete for cases. The distinguishing feature is that lawyers may submit bids with any fee arrangement they wish. We find robust evidence that bids offering hourly rates are less attractive to clients. Our findings tentatively contradict lawyers’ often-made argument that hourly rates are in a client’s best in ...

EU Competition Policy Enforcement Supports Investment in the Energy Sectors

Energy sectors—primarily power generation and gas production, but also energy transmission and distribution—require significant capital investment in infrastructure. Market structures as well as the degree of competition and regulation are key factors that determine firms’ incentive to invest. Yet the empirical research on the link between these factors and private investment is still quite scarce, ...

USA und EU setzen auf lokale Impfstoffproduktion - Versorgungssicherheit im Fokus

Die Bereitstellung eines sicheren und wirksamen Impfstoffs gegen Covid-19 ist von zentraler Bedeutung für die Aufhebung der Eindämmungsmaßnahmen im öffentlichen Leben. Um den Zugang zu Impfstoffen zu sichern, schließen Regierungen mit Impfstoffunternehmen spezielle Verträge, "Advance Purchase Agreements" (APA), ab. Diese Studie vergleicht die Beschaffungsstrategien der USA und der EU. Es kann festgestellt ...

US and EU Secure Vaccine Production on Home Soil

The deployment of a safe and effective vaccine for Covid-19 will be central to lifting containment measures. In a bid to speed up vaccine deployment, governments are entering into ‘Advance Purchase Agreements’ (APAs) with vaccine companies to secure access to vaccine doses. We document and compare the vaccine procurement strategies of the US and the EU. Most notably, we find that both the US and the ...

Ownership Diversification and Product Market Pricing Incentives

We link investor ownership to profit loads on rival firms by the managers of a firm. We propose a theory model in which we distinguish between passive and active investors’ holdings, where passive investors are relatively more diversified. We find that if passive investors become relatively bigger, then common ownership incentives increase. We show that these higher incentives, in turn, are linked ...

Common Ownership: Europe vs. the US

Common ownership - when an investor holds shares in two or more 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 with micro-economic ...

A Retrospective Study of State Aid Control in the German Broadband Market

We provide an evaluation of the impact of public subsidy schemes that aimed to support the development of basic broadband infrastructure in rural areas of Germany. Such subsidies are subject to state aid control by the European Commission (EC). While the EC increasingly recognises the role of economic analysis in controlling public aid to companies, there are to date no full retrospective studies performed ...