This paper presents a broad retrospective evaluation of mergers and merger decisions in markets dominated by multisided digital platforms. First, we document almost 300 acquisitions carried out by three major tech companies—Amazon, Facebook, and Google—between 2008 and 2018. We cluster target companies on their area of economic activity providing suggestive evidence on the strategies behind these mergers. ...
Over the past years, there has been an increase in global geopolitical risk, the most recent example being the intensifying conflict between the USA and Iran. Such geopolitical risks also affect the German economy. A geopolitical shock, defined as an unexpected increase in risk, has a significantly negative effect on the development of the German economy, and stock prices fall. By comparison, German ...
The purpose of the project is to measure the digitalisation of the German economy and to track its development over time. The results will serve as an evidence-based framework for decision makers in policy and business. The project comprises several topics. DIW Berlin focuses on the analysis of the productivity effects of digitization.
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 is the first to provide evidence that investment in Knowledge-Based Capital (KBC), despite having a positive effect on productivity at the micro level, is a driver of the weak productivity performance at the ...
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 ...
Incentives for industrial loads to provide demand response on day-ahead and reserve markets are affected both by network tariffs, as well as regulations on the provision of flexibility in different markets. This paper uses a numerical model of the chlor-alkali process with a storable intermediate good to investigate how these factors affect the provision of demand response in these markets. We also ...
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 ...
We examine whether a disclosure mandate for greenhouse gas emissions creates stakeholder pressure for firms to subsequently reduce their emissions. For UK-incorporated listed firms such a mandate was adopted in 2013. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that firms affected by the mandate reduced their emissions – depending on the specification – by an incremental 14-18% relative to a control ...