Topic Firms

Cost and Productivity Effects of Demographic Changes on Local Water Service

We investigate the impact of demographic changes on local public services taking the case of water service. We apply a structural production function approach to a large panel of German water utilities between 2003 and 2014. Exploring variation of population density and the population age structure across service areas and over time, we provide evidence that demographics and their changes significantly ...

Emergency-Aid for Self-employed in the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Flash in the Pan?

The self-employed faced strong income losses during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many governments introduced programs to financially support the self-employed during the pandemic, including Germany. The German Ministry for Economic Affairs announced a €50bn emergency-aid program in March 2020, offering one-off lump-sum payments of up to €15,000 to those facing substantial revenue declines. By reassuring ...

Antitrust Policy and Innovation

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...

German economy will first pick up speed in 2022

DIW Berlin forecasting experts are lowering their forecast for 2021 from 3.2 to 2.1 percent - Supply bottlenecks and material shortages are weighing on German industry - Private consumption remains restrained - With growth of just under five percent, the German economy will pick up speed in 2022 once bottlenecks have been overcome and infection rates have fallen on a sustained basis - Inflation no ...

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...