Topic Research and Development

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 ...

The Hidden Homeownership Welfare State: An International Long-Term Perspective on the Tax Treatment of Homeowners

Welfare is traditionally understood through social security decommodifying labor markets or social investment policies. In the domain of housing, however, welfare for homeowners is largely hidden in the tax codes’ fiscal exemptions. Based on a content analysis of legislation, this paper introduces a novel yearly database of 37 countries between 1910 and 2020 to uncover the “hidden welfare state” of ...

R&D Internationalization Strategies of the World’s Top Corporate R&D Investors

This paper contributes to the debate on the internationalization of the R&D activity of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Specifically, we examine the following research questions: (1) What are the determinants of the MNEs’ R&D internationalization level? (2) What types of internationalization strategies—home-base-augmenting (HBA), home-base-exploiting (HBE), technology-seeking (TS), and/or market-seeking ...

Crowding of International Mutual Funds

We study the relationship between crowding and performance in the active mutual fund industry. We construct a fund-specific measure of crowding using the equity holdings overlap of 17,364 global funds. Funds in the top decile of crowding underperform passive benchmark funds by 1.4% per year. The impact of crowding on performance cannot be attributed to diseconomies of scale. We explore several mechanisms: ...

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 ...

Two Dimensions of Political Trust in Russia

This paper analyzes two dimensions of factors of political trust in Russia. The first dimension is the target dimension (sociotropic vs. egocentric), the second dimension is the time dimension (retrospective vs. perspective). The study is based on the microdata of 2016 Life in Transition Survey (LiTS) of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. We find a robust evidence in favor of the ...

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 ...

Knowledge sharing within firms across space

Determinants and effects of mergers and acquisitions: Evidence from drug projects in the diabetes market

This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract:   There is an ongoing debate both in academia and in policy circles about the effects of takeovers of small, young firms by large incumbents in innovative industries. Many argue that such takeovers are anticompetitive and harm innovation by killing off nascent competition....

DG Competition of the European Commission publishes several studies evaluating State aid rules provided by a consortium with the participation of the DIW Berlin

On 2 June 2020 DG Competition of the European Commission published several support studies on the retrospective evaluation of State aid rules. This “Fitness check” will serve as a basis for future Commission’s decisions about whether to further prolong or update the rules expiring in 2020. The consortium of DIW Berlin, Lear, Sheppard Mullin and UEA Consulting under the leadership ...