Topic Research and Development

Environmentally-Responsible Households: Irresponsible Corporate Lobbying

How do firms respond to greener household preferences? We construct a novel index of environmental willingness to act on the state-quarter level based on Google Trends search data. Relating the index to firm-level information on the U.S. auto- motive sector from 2006 to 2019, we find ambiguous results. On average, firms innovate more in electric, hydrogen, and hybrid (clean) technologies and reduce ...

The Reliability of Replications: A Study in Computational Reproductions

This study investigates researcher variability in computational reproduction, an activity for which it is least expected. Eighty-five independent teams attempted numerical replication of results from an original study of policy preferences and immigration. Reproduction teams were randomly grouped into a ‘transparent group’ receiving original study and code or ‘opaque group’ receiving only a method ...

Power Generation from Nuclear Fusion Not Expected in the Foreseeable Future: Applied Research Developing Dynamically

Research into nuclear fusion for military purposes has been regularly conducted since the 1940s. However, the idea of being able to use nuclear power for power generation within mere decades has not come to fruition. While some successes have been highlighted by the media, such as the experiments at the National Ignition Facility in California at the end of 2022, the main problems remain as challenging ...

Mapping the Economy: 100 Years of DIW Berlin ; 1925-2025

Workshop on Entrepreneurship and Management

In the workshop on entrepreneurship and management at DIW Berlin, scientists discuss research results from the areas of entrepreneurship, innovation and management. The two-day event includes presentations and discussions on entrepreneurial human capital, the impact of technological progress on companies, strategies for the resilience of startups and the dynamics of innovation.

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...

Acquiring R&D Projects: Who, When, and What? Evidence from Antidiabetic Drug Development

This paper analyzes M&A patterns of R&D projects in the antidiabetics industry. For this purpose, we construct a database with all corporate individual antidiabetics R&D projects over the period 1997 - 2017, and add detailed information on firms’ technology dimension using patent information, next to their position in product markets. This allows us to identify the identity of targets and acquirers ...

The Impact of Public Procurement on Financial Barriers to General and Green Innovation

This study investigates whether public procurement mitigates or exacerbates innovative enterprises’ financial constraints. We distinguish between general and environmentally beneficial innovative enterprises. Theory suggests that the treatment effects of public procurement, particularly when mediated by the demand-pull effect, may lower a company’s funding constraints for innovation. We test this theory ...

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 ...

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 ...