We show that inventors' personal experiences of natural disasters lead to increased green innovation through changes in their higher-order beliefs about consumer preferences. We match patent records of French and German inventors and a survey of inventive firms to detailed information on natural disasters. This allows us to exploit exogenous variation in inventors’ exposure to natural disasters....
This paper studies the role of viewers’ heterogeneous ad aversion on media content demand and advertisers’ willingness to pay. High-frequency individual-level data on broadcast media content allows us to track viewers’ minute-by-minute choices within the set of available alternatives. We first illustrate the potential selection biases that arise when using aggregated market-level data to estimate...
The Berlin IO Day is a one-day workshop sponsored by the Berlin Centre for Consumer Policies (BCCP) and supported by the Berlin's leading academic institutions, including DIW Berlin, ESMT Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Technische Universität Berlin. The aim is to create an international forum for high quality research in Industrial Organization in the heart...
The workshop aims to bring together researchers from Economics, Information Systems, Law, Marketing, Strategy, and related fields who study Digitization. For inquiries dew2025@diw.de Event page
Following yesterday's Bundestag elections, DIW President Marcel Fratzscher commented on the results and the challenges facing the new German government:
Conversational AI models are becoming increasingly popular and are about to replace traditional search engines for information retrieval and product discovery. This raises concerns about monetization strategies and the potential for subtle consumer manipulation. Companies may have financial incentives to steer users toward search results or products in a conversation in ways that are unnoticeable...
This paper examines whether biased income expectations due to overconfidence lead to higher levels of debt taking. We show suggestive evidence for a link between overconfidence and borrowing behavior in a representative survey of German households (German Socio-Economic Panel–Innovation Sample [GSOEP-IS]). This motivates a laboratory experiment to study causality behind these effects. In two experiments, ...
In macroeconomic models featuring borrowing-constrained agents, the effects of monetary policy depend on the fiscal reaction to interest rate changes. This paper presents new evidence on the dynamic causal effects of U.S. monetary policy shocks on fiscal instruments and estimates a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model with fiscal feedback rules to match the empirical results. I find that U.S. fiscal ...
Renewable energy installations are rapidly gaining market share due to falling technology costs and supportive policies. Meanwhile, the energy price crisis in 2022 shifted the energy policy debate toward the question of how consumers can better benefit from the low and stable generation costs of renewable electricity. Long-term contracts for renewable energy to link producers and consumers are an option ...