Veranstaltungen

Intellectual property plays an important role in the global economy through its impact on technology diffusion, knowledge transfer and competition. There is, however, dramatic heterogeneity across both industries and countries in these effects and their implications for economic growth. In this paper, we exploit a newly developed algorithmic concordance that links patents to industry and trade classifications to characterize how patents affect the structure of global value chains. Using recent techniques to decompose gross exports and construct bilateral measures of value-added trade, we test how domestic and international (bilateral) patenting specifically related to different industries affects production fragmentation as measured by decreases in the value-added export (VAX) ratio.

Over the period 1999-2009 for 18 industries and 35 countries, we find that increased international patenting is associated with greater production fragmentation. This effect is particularly strong for “imported” or inbound international patent applications. While there is some heterogeneity among industries in this relationship, there is much greater heterogeneity among countries: For several countries, “exported” patents reduce production fragmentation and “imported” patents increase production fragmentation. As empirical research into the structure of global value chains expands, the role of patents and other forms of intellectual property merit careful consideration. The exploratory results we present are intended to provide a point of departure for continued characterization of these interrelationships.

Please drop us a line if you plan to attend: fabian.gaessler(at)ip.mpg.de

This paper challenges the conventional belief that entrepreneurship is an unstable career path. Entrepreneurship is shown to decrease rather than increase individuals’ turnover tendencies. This finding persists after controlling for lock-in effects associated with sunk costs and unfavorable outside options.

Entrepreneurship is argued to represent a high quality job-match for individuals who otherwise portray above average turnover rates. Arguably, matching emerges from (i) preferences for independence, (ii) skills composition, and (iii) redeployability of human capital into new settings. The counter-intuitive finding – entrepreneurship yields greater employment stability – has fundamental implications for our understanding of entrepreneurship entry and labor market dynamics.

We study the effect of incentives on different dimensions of creative work. To do so, we introduce a novel real-effort task that allows us to measure quantity, usability, and novelty of individuals’ creative output. In three treatments, we introduce incentives either for quantity alone or for quantity in combination with usability or novelty. We compare performance in these treatments to a baseline with fixed incentives. We find that incentivizing quantity alone or quantity in combination with novelty results in an increase in quantity and novelty and a decrease in the average quality compared to the baseline. Combined incentives for quality and quantity do not have a significant effect on any of the dimensions of creativity. Our findings are in line with a multi-tasking model where agents choose an optimal allocation of effort between quantity and usability and novelty is negatively correlated to quality. (Authors: Katharina Laske/Marina Schröder)

This paper focuses on the validation of data obtained from Google Trends as a measure of brand strength. We focus on brands of car manufacturers and types and show that searches on Google Trends predict registrations of cars in long panels. We use data for Germany and for the United Kingdom. To deal with endogeneity we make use of the introduction of scrappage subsidies in 2008/2009 as a natural experiment. We identify and address challenges from non-stationarity and serial correlation in the data. (Authors: Georg von Graevenitz/Christian Helmers)

Thematisch liegt der diesjährige Fokus der Veranstaltung auf den Chancen und Potentialen einer verstärkt innovationsorientierten bilateralen Zusammenarbeit. Die Zukunftsbrücke 2015 knüpft damit an die Idee der deutsch-chinesischen Innovationspartnerschaft an, die im Oktober 2014 im Rahmen der dritten bilateralen Konsultationen zwischen der Bundesregierung und dem chinesischen Staatsrat begründet wurde.

Das Programm der Zukunftsbrücke 2015 wird aktuelle Entwicklungen und Innovationen aus beiden Ländern in den Bereichen Wirtschaft und Technologie sowie Gesellschaft und Politik beleuchten. Als notwendige Grundlage langfristig erfolgreicher Zusammenarbeit werden zudem Fragen der nationalen Kultur und Identität und des interkulturellen Verständnisses zur Diskussion stehen.

Using panel data for 36,652 research articles published by authors from 798 institutions in 5 countries (Bolivia, Ecuador, Kenya, Nigeria, Peru), we analyze the role of access to academic works in developing countries. A focus will be drawn to the impact of a recent initiative (OARE) that seeks to provide research institutions in developing countries with free or reduced fee access to scientific literature in the field of environmental science. We use bibliometric data from Web of Science and institutions’ OARE registration data provided by the World Health Organization. We find a positive treatment effect, revealing that OARE institutions publish more as compared to non-OARE institutions. Most interestingly, we find that registration to OARE has increased competition between researchers within and between countries in different regions in the developing world. In particular, our evidence reveals a crowding-out effect for researchers from non-member institutions. (Authors: Frank Mueller-Langer/Marc Scheufen/Patrick Waelbroeck)

We use hand-collected data from four German crowdinvesting portals to analyze what determines individual investment decisions in crowdinvesting. In contrast with the crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter where the typical pattern of project support is U-shaped, we find crowdinvesting dynamics to be rather L-shaped under a first-come, first-serve mechanism and U-shaped under an auction mechanism. The evidence shows that investors base their decisions on information provided by the entrepreneur in form of updates during the campaign and by the investment behavior and comments of other crowd investors. Moreover, we find evidence for a collective attention effect and herding behavior.

Link: https://www.uni-trier.de/index.php?id=54970