Brown Bag Seminar Industrial Economics

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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This paper provides novel empirical results on the welfare impact of sanctions when countries coordinate their sanctions packages. To do so, weconduct simulations with the Caliendo and Parro (2015) CGE model of the world economy that provides changes in welfare under different hypothetical setups of sanctions coalitions. Focusing on the 2012 wave of sanctions against Iran and the 2014 sanctions ...

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Innovation has recently come to the attention of Antitrust Authorities, even though the effect of mergers on innovation is still hotly debated. I study how the activity of Antitrust Authorities impacts future innovation of merging firms. Exploiting a change in notification rules I build an event study comparing mergers notified to the authorities with non-notified ones. I develop a new methodology ...

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The housing issue is one of the hottest social problems. It is widely debated by the society. These debates contain a large subjective component. In addition, they are expected to correlate with the phases of the housing cycle. One of the most visible and durable manifestationsof these debates are the media items. In this study, we aim at assessing the sentiment of these media publications in ...

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Whether pro-social preferences identified in economic laboratory experiments survive in natural market contexts is an important and contested issue. We investigate how fairness in a laboratory experiment framed explicitly as a market exchange relates to preferences for fair trade products elicited before and at the end of the market experiment. We find that the willingness to buy at a higher price ...

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Venture capital (VC) is often seen as an instrumental tool that allows many start-ups to pursue innovation with the potential to shake-up current markets and/or to replace incumbents. Using a highly granular, project-level dataset from preclinical diabetes R&D, this paper shows that VCs actively steer the direction of R&D and streamline activities of research focused firms (pipeline firms) ...

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The European Commission commissioned an international consortium including the DIW Berlin with a background study on State aid in the field of environmental protection and energy. The results of the study are meant to support the Commission in the revision of the EU Guidelines on State aid for environmental protection and energy (EEAG). One key focus of the study was to assess the current rules ...

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The self-employed are among those facing the highest probability of strong income losses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments in many countries introduced support programs to support the self-employed, including the German federal government, which approved a €50bn emergency aid program at the end of March 2020 offering one-off lump-sum payments of up to €15,000 to those facing ...

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Germany is leading in green competitiveness of its product exports. Deploying the green economic complexity methodology using German AFiD firm-level micro data, this study seeks to analyze explanatory variables for this trend such as green R&D subsidies and subnational density of related green technologies in the light of path dependencies in firms accumulation of green capabilities. It ...

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We provide a description of ownership patterns in the top 25 European banks for the period 2003–2015, where we especially focus on the global financial crisis. Investment managers, such as Blackrock, are dominant in terms of number of block holdings in different banks, maintaining fairly stable “common ownership” networks throughout our sample. However, the financial crisis led ...

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Common ownership - when an investor holds shares in two 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 measure derived from ...

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This is an online seminar using Cisco Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract:   Large-scale personal data collection for the purpose of personalized predictions has been driven by high expectations of efficiency gains in many business and policy settings. Yet, quantifying the trade-off between the costs of linking disconnected silos of personal ...

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This is an online seminar using Cisco Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract:   A fast growing and diverse literature has addressed one of the riddles of economic developments: the declining labor productivity growth in almost all advanced economies. One of the reasons discussed is the shift towards service industries with inherently low ...

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