The deployment of a safe and effective vaccine for Covid-19 will be central to lifting containment measures. In a bid to speed up vaccine deployment, governments are entering into ‘Advance Purchase Agreements’ (APAs) with vaccine companies to secure access to vaccine doses. We document and compare the vaccine procurement strategies of the US and the EU. Most notably, we find that both...
This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract: There is an ongoing debate both in academia and in policy circles about the effects of takeovers of small, young firms by large incumbents in innovative industries. Many argue that such takeovers are anticompetitive and harm innovation by killing off nascent competition....
The tremendous growth of digital transactions has profoundly affected the way we interact, opening vast opportunities to improve our lives. Consumers have benefited from an unprecedented proliferation of new services and products that previously were simply too costly to be developed and marketed to customers. These digital interactions create vast amounts of data. While firms are already using...
On 2 June 2020 DG Competition of the European Commission published several support studies on the retrospective evaluation of State aid rules. This “Fitness check” will serve as a basis for future Commission’s decisions about whether to further prolong or update the rules expiring in 2020. The consortium of DIW Berlin, Lear, Sheppard Mullin and UEA Consulting under the leadership ...
This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract: Antibiotic resistance is a severe problem within our current health systems. One of the main strategies to combat the rise of antibiotic resistance is to improve individual physicians' antibiotic prescribing practices. However, this strategy requires that differences in...
Abstract: User generated content is increasingly substituting content created by professionals. Local news that is generated by citizen journalists could be a promising way of supporting the struggling newspaper industry by reducing costs for professional journalists. We study a network of 122 local Austrian newspapers operating a hybrid model of citizen and professional journalism. We first...
This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract: Cities worldwide have regulated the peer-to-peer short-term rental market claiming that those markets remove apartments from the long-term housing market, causing an increase in rents. However, at the time many of these policies were passed, empirical evidence for or...
This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract: In the last ten years, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) acquired more than 400 companies, predominantly in the technological sector. Competition authorities did not scrutinize most of these transactions, as they did not reach the traditional thresholds,...
This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract: This paper analyzes the relationship between common ownership – when two firms are partially held by the same investor – and markups. Combining firm-level financial data from Europe with ownership data of publicly listed firms, we structurally estimate production...