Events

Recent research and policy initiatives suggest that entrepreneurship serves as a pathway for reintegrating ex-felons into the labor market by reducing the stigma they face among prospective employers. However, the long-term outcomes of entrepreneurial careers for individuals with criminal records remain poorly understood. Using Danish administrative data, we investigate how the type of sentences received by individuals convicted of crimes relates to their subsequent labor market trajectories and, particularly, their transition into entrepreneurship. We study how community service sentences, as an alternative to imprisonment, shape ex-felons’ labor market trajectories and long-term outcomes. We find that individuals sentenced with community service are significantly less likely to engage in entrepreneurship than comparable individuals who were incarcerated instead. This aligns with prior research pointing to entrepreneurship as an alternative employment pathway for those stigmatized in the labor market. Importantly, we also find that ex-felons who turn to entrepreneurship - especially after having been incarcerated - suffer a persistent income disadvantage afterwards and exhibit higher rates of recidivism than those who find regular employment. Hence, our findings question how effective entrepreneurship can be as a social mobility and reintegration pathway for individuals with criminal records.

Contact person: Svenja Friess

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The Munich Summer Institute (MSI) is hosted by the Center for Law & Economics at ETH Zurich, HEC Lausanne, Northeastern University, the Chair for Technology and Innovation Management at TUM, the Chair for Economics of Innovation at TUM, the Institute for Strategy, Technology and Organization (ISTO) at the LMU Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition.

Program as pdf
Further information on the website of the MSI.

Panel 1: Ukraine: The “Other” Science

Panel 2: Intellectual Property Data: the Case of Ukraine

Panel 3: Exploring Entrepreneurship and Industry in Ukraine: A Data-driven Perspective

Contact person: Liudmyla Petrenko

Ukraine has been engaged in the process of harmonising its statistical information for over a decade. However, this process is far from complete. In many cases, Ukrainian official statistics employs the same definitions as those used in OECD countries, but the methods of collecting data and calculations are not in line with international standards. This can be illustrated by the following examples of full-time equivalent (FTE) calculations for human R&D potential and expenditures on R&D. The Ukrainian State Statistical Service (SSS) does not provide data on the financing of STI in comparable formats, which makes it difficult to assess the dynamics of corresponding processes. This is further complicated by the restricted access to the initial information, which has two aspects. Firstly, the construction of samples is not always justified, as not all groups of innovative enterprises are represented in the surveys in an appropriate manner. Secondly, there is limited access to data from individual research organisations and innovative enterprises. Furthermore, official statistics contain some ‘obsolete’ indicators, while modern ones are not used due to certain formal reasons. This situation must be rectified, and the SSS will need to adopt more flexible procedures to accelerate the process of European integration in research and innovation statistics. The utilisation of official statistics for the evaluation of the performance of research organisations is an example of an attempt to implement international standards in this area. These issues and opportunities will be discussed in greater detail within this research presentation.

Contact person: Anastasiia Lutsenko

Firms have increasingly been competing through design. We show how computer vision techniques can be leveraged to measure the visual similarity of design rights across large data sets of product design images. Thus we extract and standardize 611,810 unique design images embedded in US design rights (1976–2020), adapt the structural similarity index measure to quantify design similarities between images, and rigorously validate the resulting design rights similarity measure. We then use that measure to produce novel empirical evidence that the similarity density of a design space exhibits an inverted U-shape with respect to the likelihood of that space’s design rights being litigated—a relationship proposed previously but never tested. Our design rights similarity measure should facilitate the exploration of new research questions in the fields of design rights, innovation, and strategy. We grant open access to our code and data resources to encourage research in these areas. 
(co-authored with Tian Cian and Cornelia Storz)

Contact person: David Heller

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We define the concept of moral cost of carbon (MCC): the internal carbon price that individuals implicitly apply to their consumption decisions. We argue that the MCC is a key metric for policy design. The gap between MCC and an actual carbon price tells us how much the carbon externality should be priced. It also reveals the political barriers to implementing a broad-based carbon pricing scheme. We propose an experimental approach to  measure the MCC among a target population. A key challenge is that information gaps and the choice environment could have large impacts and confound its elicitation. Our experimental design aims to address these problems. In particular, we show how malleable the MCC is with respect to extrinsic incentives.
(Co-authored by Sébastien Houde, Joachim Schleich, Corinne Faure)

Contact person: Albert Roger

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Matthias Tschöp (Scientific Director, CEO and Spokesman of the Management Board at Helmholtz Munich) and Dietmar Harhoff talk about innovation, transfer and start-ups as well as breakthroughs in drug development. Digitalization is influencing medicine in all areas, including research. Start-ups are also becoming increasingly important for transferring research results into application. Matthias Tschöp is an important and successful player in these areas and will report on his experiences.

The Max Planck Digitality Fireside Chat is an informal event format for in-depth talks and discussions on digitality and digital transformation. The aim is to allow for an exchange between researchers and digital pioneers who have come forward with new concepts, proposals and ideas, and are actively shaping digitalization.

We explore how firms respond to downstream product shocks. We find that affected firms increase research and development and make additional safety-related upstream investments. These investments vary with firm capabilities and across shock severity. Competitors appear to vicariously learn and also engage in similar upstream investments in affected markets. We present evidence that these upstream investments have important performance implications. First, these investments are positively related to transition probabilities and approval rates for products that received them. Second, these upstream investments are related to a decrease in the intensity and rate of future downstream product shocks. Surprisingly, however, these upstream investments appear to have limited impact on mitigating the negative demand response caused by these shocks.  

Contact person: Marina Chugunova

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Large corporate labs play an important role in innovation. Recently, there has been a trend toward universities producing scientific research and then corporate labs developing this research into practical applications. This division of scientific research labor can have negative consequences for the development of general purpose technologies and other enabling technologies. These technologies rely on a positive feedback loop of innovation, from seeding to complementary trajectories and back, in order to generate substantial productivity gains for companies and for the economy overall. A push against the increasing division of scientific research labor may catalyze the feedback loop. We explore this possibility in the context of the development of quantum computers. After a change in companies’ incentives to engage in scientific research, following a surprise announcement about the near-term commercial potential of quantum computing, we document a rise in company academic publications and patents in quantum computing hardware. Soon after, we document a rise in academic publications and patents in the complementary software trajectory. We also find suggestive evidence of a feedback loop between the hardware and the software trajectories. We interpret these results to suggest complementarities between company and university scientific research in the context of a newly emerging enabling technology.

Contact person: Daehyun Kim

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