Topic Industry

Growing Clean? Directing Technological Change in Germany

The emerging net zero paradigm requires economies to go green; and Europe’s ambition is to lead the way. This requires directing technological change toward cleaner growth, which intersects with green industrial policies in the form of green innovation subsidies. Leveraging a quasi-exhaustive novel dataset on German R&D subsidies, we provide rigorous evidence on whether green R&D subsidies...

Spatial Competition and Pass-through of Fuel Taxes: Evidence from a Quasi-natural Experiment in Germany

This paper analyses the pass-through rates and their determinants of the temporary German fuel discount in 2022 at its start and its termination. Based on a unique dataset of fuel station characteristics and prices, we employ a Regression Discontinuity in Time (RDiT) methodology to estimate heterogeneous pass-through rates. Our main contribution is to identify the impact of horizontal and vertical ...

Bridges over Troubled Waters: Climate Clubs, Alliances, and Partnerships as Safeguards for Effective International Cooperation?

Driven by the motivation to raise the ambition level of climate action and to foster the transformation of economies, current climate policy discourse revolves around ways to improve cooperation between industrialized countries and emerging economies. We identify three broad types of initiatives—multilateral-cross sectoral, multilateral, sector specific, and climate and development partnerships—and ...

The Evolution of Theories of Harm in EU Merger Control

We discuss the main Theories of Harm in EU merger control and their evolution since the 1990s. We present stylised facts and trends using data extracted from EU merger decisions by natural language processing tools. EU merger policy has adapted over time, both in terms of legislation and theories of harm, as well as in terms of the investigative tools and evidence used. The introduction of the new ...

Revisiting Investment Costs for Green Steel: Capital Expenditures, Firm Level Impacts, and Policy Implications

The transition of the steel sector to carbon neutrality requires significant investment. In this study, we aim to better understand the scale of investment required for a transition to hydrogen-based steelmaking and the ability of listed steelmakers to finance this investment. First, we analyze how capital expenditures are estimated in the academic literature and compare them with reported investment ...

Enabling Circular Economy Dynamics in the Plastics and Steel Industries: Perspectives from Multiple Stakeholders

This paper investigates the perspectives of stakeholder groups in the plastic and steel value chains on transitioning toward a circular economy (CE). Through semistructured interviews with 31 business stakeholders, we analyze business strategies, key factors, challenges and opportunities, as well as coordination and regulatory needs for a successful industry-wide CE transition. Our findings highlight ...

Entrepreneurship, Management, and Cognitive Reflection: A Preregistered Replication Study With Extensions

Intuition is a central element of entrepreneurial decision-making. We conceptually replicate a published study by using new representative data from 1961 adults and the widely used Cognitive Reflection Test, which assesses the ability to avoid intuitive decisions and to switch to an analytical process. We extend the analysis by exploring occupational sorting versus environmental influence as mechanisms, ...

Intangible Capital and Productivity Divergence

Understanding the causes of the slowdown in aggregate productivity growth is key to maintaining the competitiveness of advanced economies and ensuring long-term economic prosperity. This paper provides evidence that investment in intangible capital, despite having a positive effect on productivity at the micro level, is a driver of the weak productivity performance at the aggregate level as it amplifies ...

German Financial State Aid during Covid-19 Pandemic: Higher Impact among Digitalized Self-Employed

Industrial electricity prices in Germany have risen sharply