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Brown Bag Seminar Industrial Economics

Returns to Data: Evidence from Web Tracking

Tracking online user behavior is essential for targeted advertising and is at the heart of the business model of major online platforms. We analyze tracker-specific web browsing data to show how the prediction quality of consumer profiles varies with data size and scope. We find decreasing returns to the number of observed users and tracked websites. However, prediction quality increases considerably ...

Options for Importing Green Hydrogen into Germany by 2030: Transportation Routes, Country Assessments and Implementation Requirements ; Analysis

Whether or not Germany can be carbon-neutral by 2045 will also depend on whether hydrogen can be successfully utilised. The ramp-up of a green hydrogen economy which includes a substantial, industrial-scale supply of hydrogen by 2030 is an ambitious goal. The strong rise in the demand for green hydrogen and its synthesis products by industry (e.g. steel, chemical and glass industries), transport (shipping, ...

Merger Remedies and Bargaining Power in the Coffee Market

This paper analyzes a merger of large manufacturers with divestiture in the French coffee market. In contrast to previous approaches used to study the effects of upstream divestitures on prices and welfare, we model the vertical market structure. First, our results show that the standard policy recommendation to require divestiture to small recipient firms may not hold when asymmetric bargaining power ...

Government-Made House Price Bubbles? Austerity, Homeownership, Rental, and Credit Liberalization Policies and the “Irrational Exuberance” on Housing Markets

Housing bubbles and crashes are catastrophic events for economies, implying enormous destruction of housing wealth, financial default risks, construction unemployment, and business cycle downturns. This paper investigates whether governmental housing policies can affect economies’ propensity to build up speculative house price bubbles. Specifically, we focus on the liberalization effects of rent and ...

Leverage, Competitiveness and Systemic Risk in Banking

Die Steuerbefreiung von Fremdkapitalzinsen verschafft Fremdkapital einen erheblichen Finanzierungsvorteil gegenüber Eigenkapital. Dieser Steuervorteil bewirkt, dass insbesondere Banken mit extreme Schuldenhebel arbeiten und somit große Überschuldungsrisiken eingehen. Diese Steuerbefreiung von Fremdkapitalzinsen widerspricht somit den Zielen der prudenziellen Eigenkapitalregulierung, die zum Zwecke ...

Competition and Moral Behavior: A Meta-Analysis of Forty-Five Crowd-Sourced Experimental Designs

Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental ...

What is the Right Geographic Market Definition?

What is the “right” geographic definition of relevant markets? We study how unexpected and exogenous increases in excise duties in petroleum products were passed-through to retail prices in the Athens region and examine how the degree of the pass-through varies across different geographic relevant markets. Using various definitions of the relevant geographic market, we find that the most...

Revisiting the Relatedness Hypothesis: The Impact of Merger Relatedness on Acquiring and Rival Firm Value  

Despite intuitive appeal, empirical evidence supporting the relatedness hypothesis has been scant, as it has not been established that related acquisitions generally outperform unrelated acquisitions. In considering the impact of merger relatedness on not only acquiring-firm value – as is standard in the relatedness literature – but also on non-merging rival firm value, we offer an alternative perspective ...

Limited Price Competition Among Real Estate Agents and the Role of Inattention

This paper relates incomplete price competition among real estate agents to inattentive home sellers. I exploit a recent legal reform in Germany which specifically aimed to increase price competition among real estate agents by raising the cost salience of sellers. I find that the reform backfired and real estate agents exploited the transition to increase their total commission rate by 0.3...