The tremendous growth of digital transactions – mainly through online platforms - is profoundly affecting the way we interact and opening vast opportunities to improve our lives. Consumers are benefiting from an unprecedented proliferation of new services and products that previously were too costly to be developed and marketed to customers. At the same time, the characteristics of platform...
Based on findings from high-income countries, typically economists hypothesize that having more children unambiguously decreases the time mothers spend in the labor market. Few studies on lower-income countries, in which low household wealth, informal child care, and informal employment opportunities prevail, find mixed results. Using Mexican census data, I do not find evidence for negative employment ...
Dieses Hintergrundpapier stellt wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse vor, die sich mit den grundlegenden Herausforderungen ressourcenreicher Länder bei der Dekarbonisierung ihrer Wirtschaft beschäftigen. Es zeigt sich eine eher skeptische Einschätzung des aktuellen Klimaambitionsniveaus vieler dieser Länder sowie der Erwartungen hinsichtlich der Erreichung nicht nur der aktuellen NDCs, sondern ...
We investigate patterns in common ownership networks between firms that are active in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry for the period 2004–2014. Our main findings are that “brand firms”—that is, firms that have research and development capabilities and launch new drugs—exhibit relatively dense common ownership networks with each other that further increase significantly in density over time, whereas ...
This paper presents a broad retrospective evaluation of mergers and merger decisions in markets dominated by multisided digital platforms. First, we document almost 300 acquisitions carried out by three major tech companies—Amazon, Facebook, and Google—between 2008 and 2018. We cluster target companies on their area of economic activity providing suggestive evidence on the strategies behind these mergers. ...
We provide an evaluation of the impact of public subsidy schemes that aimed to support the development of basic broadband infrastructure in rural areas of Germany. Such subsidies are subject to state aid control by the European Commission (EC). While the EC increasingly recognises the role of economic analysis in controlling public aid to companies, there are to date no full retrospective studies performed ...
Employment agencies aim to match individuals to appropriate jobs. There are public and private employment agencies, which co-exist in many countries. Selection effects may be relevant in the sense that private agencies potentially engage in ‘cream-skimming’ by prioritizing highly qualified workers. The resulting job match quality is also important from an individual, a firm, and a society perspective. ...
An increasing body of empirical evidence is documenting trends toward rising concentration, profits, and markups in many industries around the world since the 1980s. Two major criticisms of these studies is that concentration and market shares are poorly measured at the national industry level while firm level revenues are a poor indicator of product sales. We use a novel database that identifies over ...