Topic Industry

The Value of Time in the United States: Estimates from Nationwide Natural Field Experiments

Merger, Product Variety and Firm Entry: the Retail Craft Beer Market in California

Market Concentration in Europe: Evidence from Antitrust Markets

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 ...

A Retrospective Study of State Aid Control in the German Broadband Market

We provide an evaluation of the impact of German public subsidy schemes in municipalities of Bavaria and Lower Saxony aimed at supporting the deployment of basic broadband infrastructure in rural Germany. Such subsidies are subject to state aid control by the European Commission and may only be granted if the potential market failure is addressed without distorting competition. We first analyse the ...

Merger Policy in Digital Markets: An Ex-Post Assessment

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. ...

Competitors’ Reactions to Big Tech Acquisitions: Evidence from Mobile Apps

Since 2010, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) have acquired more than 400 companies. Competition authorities did not scrutinize most of these transactions and blocked none. This raised concerns that GAFAM acquisitions target potential competitors yet fly under the radar of current merger control due to the features of the digital economy. We empirically study the competitive effects ...

Green Deal for Industry: A Clear Policy Framework Is More Important Than Funding

The European Commission is facing the challenge and opportunity of implementing the Green Deal while simultaneously initiating the recovery of the economy following the coronavirus crisis. Investments in the basic materials industry’s transition to climate neutrality play a central role in this, as the sector is responsible for 16 percent of the EU’s CO2 emissions and is key to downstream value chains. ...

Common Ownership in the U.S. Pharmaceutical Industry: A Network Analysis

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 ...

Chances and Obstacles to Strengthening the Paris Agreement: The Case of Resource-Rich Countries

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 ...

A 2050 Perspective on the Role for Carbon Capture and Storage in the European Power System and Industry Sector

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) might be a central technology to reach the decarbonisation goals of the European energy system. However, CCS deployment faces multiple economic, technological, and infrastructure challenges. Related literature tends to only focus on certain aspects of the CCS technology or to be limited to a particular sector perspective. In contrast, this paper presents a holistic ...