Brown Bag Seminar Industrial Economics

The acquisitions of startups by Google, Amazon, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft have steadily increased over the past years and have become more diversified. The current discussion about strategic motives for such acquisitions is vivid – especially in light of present concerns about the market power of gatekeepers, faster technological advances and digitalization. The principal question remains whether ...

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International trade separates the location where emissions occur (production) and where they are ultimately consumed. Thus, a substantial share of emissions is embodied in international trade. Moreover, firms within narrowly defined industries differ in their emission intensity. However, most firm-level studies only consider the direct emissions released during the production process. In this ...

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This paper examines the impact of RMB internationalization reforms on invoicing currency choices of firms exporting to China. Using detailed French customs data spanning 2011-2017, it documents three novel stylized facts on RMB adoption and suggests a novel mechanism that drives the self-selection of firms into RMB invoicing. Additionally, it provides causal estimates of the impact of RMB use on ...

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This paper studies how bargaining power is affected by merger and divestiture policies. I provide a new empirical framework to compute bounds on brand-level bargaining weights using widely available sales data. Next, I exploit the variation in brand ownership caused by a large merger, cleared conditional on divestiture, in the U.S. deodorant market, to quantify the extent to which divestitures ...

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What is the “right” geographic definition of relevant markets? We study how unexpected and exogenous increases in excise duties in petroleum products were passed-through to retail prices in the Athens region and examine how the degree of the pass-through varies across different geographic relevant markets. Using various definitions of the relevant geographic market, we find that the most ...

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Antibiotics are effective in treating bacterial infections. However, the excessive usage of antibiotics leads to the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, which significantly reduces their effectiveness. Current strategies to address antibiotic resistance mainly target primary care physicians, who serve as the gatekeepers of antibiotic prescriptions in many countries. Therefore, it is ...

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This paper empirically analyses the impact of government ownership on competition in monopoly and duopoly markets. We use the European Airline Industry as a laboratory. In our empirical strategy we exploit two sources of exogenous variations that allow us to cleanly filter out the effect of government ownership on the likelihood of exit. First, we study government ownership that was triggered by a ...

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This paper relates incomplete price competition among real estate agents to inattentive home sellers. I exploit a recent legal reform in Germany which specifically aimed to increase price competition among real estate agents by raising the cost salience of sellers. I find that the reform backfired and real estate agents exploited the transition to increase their total commission rate by 0.3 ...

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The European Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS) is the key policy tool of the EU to reduce GHG emissions. To prevent carbon leakage, most of the emission permits have been allocated for free in the industrial sector. A carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) will be introduced end of 2023 as an alternative carbon leakage protection instrument. However, the CBAM will only gradually replace free ...

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We examine how competition affects VAT pass-through in isolated oligopolistic markets as defined by the Greek islands. Using daily gasoline prices and a difference-in-differences methodology, we study how changes in VAT rates are passed through to consumers in islands with different number of retailers. We show that pass-through increases with competition, going from 50% in monopoly to around 80% ...

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The innovation impact of acquisitions of small targets with products close to launch by large product market incumbents is currently debated, weighing whether incumbents might preemptively terminate or “kill” the innovative projects of these targets. This paper provides empirical evidence on which M&A deals spur and which stifle innovation. To this end, we not only look at the product market ...

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The seminar organized by the "Firms and Markets" department: * provides an opportunity to present on-going research, * focuses on advances in applied microeconomics, industrial organization, and economic policy issues, * serves as a forum for discussing both academic and project-related research, * intends to provide a platform for the exchange of ideas. Coordination: Jonas Hannane

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This paper empirically analyses the impact of government ownership on competition. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent governmental equity interventions in the European airline industry provides for a particularly ideal setting to investigate this topic, and this for several reasons. First, airline markets and competition therein are well-defined and well-understood. Second, European countries ...

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Advertising on e-commerce platforms, which enables third-party sellers to place their products as sponsored listings within organic results, is a widespread phenomenon, creating large revenues for online marketplaces. While economic theory suggests that advertising can serve as a signal for product quality, the empirical evidence is ambiguous. In this project, I collect data from a leading online ...

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In the absence of globally coordinated action to combat climate change, governments are concerned that ambitious carbon pricing could harm the competitiveness of emission-intensive industries. A prominent measure to prevent that manufacturing producers relocate to countries with laxer environmental regulation are carbon border adjustments often referred to as carbon tariffs. Several studies have ...

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We analyze mergers between strategic data intermediaries collecting consumer information that they sell to firms competing in a product market. We show that a merger: (a) reduces the intensity of competition in the product market through a change in the selling strategies of merging intermediaries; (b) increases data collection, reducing consumer surplus through a better rent extraction. We argue ...

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High growth firms are high on the policy agenda as empirical evidence consistently shows that they disproportionately contribute to economic growth via net job creation. Several innovation scholars analyze how high growth entrepreneurship responds to the local enabling environment, such as institutional and framework conditions. However, the majority of these studies look at the role of formal ...

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How does online advertising affect consumer behaviour, product pricing and competition? To analyse this, I develop a theory of digital markets where an intermediary provides a platform for firms to advertise their product and where consumers need to engage in costly search if they want to learn about the product characteristics. First, I show that when prices are observable ...

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Physicians in primary care provide initial diagnosis and treatment for a diverse set of patients. However, whereas patients are demographically and socio-economically heterogeneous, physicians typically come from affluent and highly-educated backgrounds. As a result, there is often a mismatch between physicians and the community they serve. I investigate the role of patient-physician similarity ...

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Using data on 4.1 million apps at the Google Play Store from 2016 to 2019, we document that GDPR induced the exit of about a third of available apps; and in the quarters following implementation, entry of new apps fell by half. We estimate a structural model of demand and entry in the app market. Comparing long-run equilibria with and without GDPR, we find that GDPR reduces consumer surplus and ...

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