Topic Firms

Scientific analyses on the introduction, design, and scaling of Carbon Contracts for Difference (CCfD) for the decarbonization of basic industries

Overview The project relates to the current political discussion on the decarbonization of industry. The focus is on project-based Carbon Contracts for Difference (CCfD) for industry. An important focus is on the design and monitoring of a national support scheme. The research results of the project are incorporated into the development of the program as required and as targeted as possible....

Venture Capital in Diabetes: A Yes to Big Hits, a No to Competition

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)...

Minimum wages and the wage policy of firms

State Aid for Environmental Protection and Energy – Focus on Electro-intensive Firms

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...

Emergency Aid for the Self-Employed in the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Flash in the Pan?

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...

2nd DIW Women’s Finance Summit: The Future of Financial Services – Digitization, Sustainability and Post-Pandemic Growth Models

After failing to fully recover from the last financial crisis, the pandemic poses major new challenges for banks. However, this time, banks are not the problem, but part of the solution. By providing credit to the economy, banks play a crucial role in fighting the pandemic by ensuring the transmission of fiscal and monetary stimulus to the economy. Nevertheless, banks are not among the winners of...

What Drives Green Capabilities? Evidence from German Firm-level Data

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...

The rise of common ownership: Europe vs the US

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...

Common Ownership Patterns in the European Banking Sector – The Impact of the Financial Crisis

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...

ECB Policy Facilitating Corporate Financing in the Green Bond Market

The green bond market has grown strongly in recent years, especially in the euro area. With regard to the European Union’s climate targets, it is likely that the demand for green bonds—bonds that specifically support sustainable projects— will continue to increase in the future. The European Central Bank (ECB) is buying green bonds as well and is planning to reorient its strategy towards more sustainability. ...