Abstract: An increasing body of empirical evidence has documented trends to risen concentration, profits, markups, and market power in many industries across the world since the 1980s. Several factors – such as globalisation, digitisation, the increased role of intangible assets and sunk costs, as well as M&A activity and the (under)enforcement of merger control– have been...
Industrial demand response can play an important part in balancing the intermittent production from a growing share of renewable energies in electricity markets. This paper analyses the role of aggregators – intermediaries between participants and power markets – in facilitating industrial demand response. Based on the results from semi-structured interviews with German demand response aggregators, ...
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 substantial revenue ...
Commonly described as the “gender care gap”, there is a persistent gender difference in the division of domestic responsibilities in most developed countries. We provide novel evidence on the short- and long-run effects of an exogenous shock on paternal availability, through a job loss, on the allocation of domestic work within couples. We find that paternal child care and housework significantly increase ...
In current power markets, the bulk of electricity is sold wholesale and transported to consumers via long-distance transmission lines. Recently, decentralized local power markets have evolved, often as isolated networks based on solar generation. We analyze strategic pricing, investment, and welfare in local power markets. We show that local power markets with peer-to-peer trading are competitive and ...
The rise of dominant firms in data driven industries is often credited to their alleged data advantage. Empirical evidence lending support to this conjecture is surprisingly scarce. In this paper we document that data as an input into machine learning tasks display features that support the claim of data being a source of market power. We study how data on keywords improve the search result quality ...
In online commerce, obfuscation strategies by sellers are hypothesized to mislead consumers to their detriment and to the profit of sellers. One such obfuscation strategy is partitioned pricing in which the price is split into a base price and add-on fees. While empirical evidence suggests that partitioned pricing affects consumer decisions through salience effects, its consumer welfare consequences ...
The rise of online platforms has disrupted numerous traditional industries. A prime example is the short-term accommodation platform Airbnb and how it affects the hotel industry. On the one hand, consumers can profit from Airbnb due to an increased number of choices and lower prices. On the other hand, critics of the platform argue that it allows professional hosts to operate de facto hotels while ...
Based on findings from high-income countries, typically economists hypothesize that having more children unambiguously decreases the time mothers spend in the labor mar- ket. 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 find a positive effect of an instrument-induced ...
We investigate patterns in common ownership networks between firms that are active in the US pharmaceutical industry for the period 2004-2014. Our main findings are that “brand firms” — i.e. firms that have R&D capabilities and launch new drugs — exhibit relatively dense common ownership networks with each other that further increase significantly in density over time, whereas the network of “generic ...