The existential threat to small businesses, based on their crucial role in the economy, is behind the plethora of scholarly studies in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining the 14 contributions of the special issue on the “Economic Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses,” the paper comprises four parts: a systematic review of the literature on the ...
The analysis of local environmental policies is essential when evaluating the consistency of national public policies vis-à-vis the compliance of global agreements to reduce climate change. This study explores one of these policies; the 2021 Mexican reform to change electric power dispatch from a marginal-cost-based to a command and control physical system prioritizing power generation from the state ...
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 ...
Venture capital (VC) is often seen as an instrumental tool that allows many start-ups to pursue innovation with the potential to shake-up current markets and/or to replace incumbents. Using a highly granular, project-level dataset from preclinical diabetes R&D, this paper shows that VCs actively steer the direction of R&D and streamline activities of research focused firms (pipeline firms)...
We provide an evaluation of the impact of public subsidy schemes that aimed to support the development of basic broadband infrastructure in rural areas of Germany. Such subsidies are subject to state aid control by the European Commission (EC). While the EC increasingly recognises the role of economic analysis in controlling public aid to companies, there are to date no full retrospective studies performed ...
Steam coal exporters face increasing uncertainty about future coal demand and risks of asset stranding. Nevertheless, new export-oriented coal mine projects are still brought forward. In this study, we use the coal sector model COALMOD-World to assess the economic prospects of investments in the export-oriented steam coal sector, and in particular of coal mines in the Galilee Basin, Australia. We parameterize ...
Firms with superior productivity, labeled superstar firms, are argued to be the link between rising concentration and the fall of the aggregate labor share in the US. This analysis confirms that similar evidence is found within the European context: the market share and firm size increase, whereas the labor share decreases with productivity. One of the much discussed mechanisms behind this development ...
Over the course of the 20th century, governments have frequently used rent control to keep rents affordable, especially in times of crisis when housing is scarce. Existing research shows that rent control has undesirable side effects, such as overall societal welfare losses, market misallocation, a declining housing supply, and lower mobility. However, there has been little research examining the effect ...
Real estate is taxed at comparatively low rates in Germany, with primarily the affluent benefiting from numerous existing tax privileges. This Weekly Report describes the current state of real estate taxation in Germany and outlines reform proposals that could increase tax revenue, improve the efficiency of the tax system, and reduce wealth and income inequality. In the case of property tax, value-based ...
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 ...