Events

In this paper, we investigate one factor that can directly contribute to—as well as indirectly shed light on the other causes of—the gender gap in academic publishing: time and length of peer review. Using detailed administrative data from an economics field journal, we find that referees spend longer reviewing female-authored papers, are slower to recommend accepting them, manuscripts by women go through more rounds of review and their authors spend longer revising them. Less disaggregated data from 32 economics and finance journals corroborate these results. We conclude by showing that all gender gaps decline—and eventually disappear—as the same referee reviews more papers. This pattern suggests novice referees initially statistically discriminate against female authors, but are less likely to do so as their information about and confidence in the peer review process improves. More generally, they also suggest that women may be particularly disadvantaged when evaluators are less familiar with the objectives and parameters of an assessment framework.

Link to paper
 

Contact person: Svenja Friess

Programme as PDF

Estimating Technological Gains and Losses from Environmental Regulation
Presenter: Albert Roger (Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition)
Discussant: Kyung Yul Lee (TUM)

The Locus of Value Capture
Presenter: Adrian Goettfried (TUM)
Discussant: Katerina Dubovska (ISTO)

We study the impact of disclosing greenhouse gas emissions (CO2) on the liquidity of firms’ equity. For the subset of firms that report emissions, we find that higher emissions lead to lower liquidity. However, firms that do disclose emissions have lower bid-ask spreads than firms that do not. This is because these firms are more liquid before disclosing emissions but also because when firms first disclose emissions, bid-ask spreads decrease by roughly 13%. These results hold for high information asymmetry firms, for high and low carbon intensity firms, and for early and late disclosing firms. Our results are consistent with theory that shows that more information asymmetry leads to lower liquidity and that ESG-motivated investors may also be noise traders.

Contact person: David Heller

Subscription to the invitation mailing list and more information on the seminar page.

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.

To the Program

Further information on the website of the MSI

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Marstallplatz 1, Munich, room E10

On 5 May 2023, the Institute hosted the 9th Max.P Salon. Robert Schlögl, President of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, spoke to members of the Max Planck Foundation about the chances and challenges of regenerative energies, making an impassioned plea for rapid, large-scale action to reduce CO2 emissions.

On green electrons and green molecules

How can we successfully shape the transition from fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas, to renewable energies such as solar energy, wind energy, and hydrogen?

The triumph of renewable energies seems unstoppable. The generation of electricity by solar energy, wind energy and hydropower has great potential, but the energy yield fluctuates and storage technologies have only limited capacities. Even if we have 100% green power, we still rely on material energy sources for about 80% of our needs. What is therefore necessary, is a second mainstay for the energy system of the future in the form of a C02-neutral molecular energy carrier - for which only hydrogen comes into question. Prof. Schlögl spoke at the 9th MAX.P Salon to supporters of the Max Planck Society on how the appropriate technologies can be developed and the necessary hydrogen partnerships forged, and whether hydrogen can then be exclusively green or also blue or turquoise.

The chemist Robert Schlögl has been the new President of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation since 1 January 2023, and is Director Emeritus at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Berlin, and at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion in Mülheim an der Ruhr. He is an internationally renowned and excellently networked scientist with a research focus on energy conversion processes and has been honored with numerous awards, including the Eni Award in Energy Transition, which is referred to as the “Nobel Prize for Energy”.

He emphasized that no single country can solve the global challenge: Self-sufficiency is a dangerous delusion, so is sufficiency. Global technologies and markets are the only viable way – realized with large amounts of stored energy: hydrogen is vast. The new steady state of the planet is terra incognita. Therefore, we must reduce CO2 emissions as quickly as possible on a large scale, not with small and difficult measures.

The Max.P Salon is a Salon of Science founded in 2020 by members of the Board of Trustees of the Max Planck Foundation. The Max Planck Foundation, established in 2006, is a private and non-profit funding association that exclusively supports the Max Planck Society and its institutes, and makes its funds available for excellent, innovative and pioneering projects and research endeavors. It is one of the largest science-funding foundations in Germany.

Video (in German) with photo impressions from the event on Youtube

Women continue to be underrepresented in the field of economics, especially among permanent faculty. Using 40 years of Danish administrative data combined with bibliometric data on publications from the Scopus database, we study the impact of children on women’s probability of successful academic careers. Our event study estimates show that parenthood reduces women’s likelihood of staying in academia by 10 percent relative to men, and the gap appears to be permanent. We further document a gender gap in the likelihood of getting tenure in the three years following parenthood, conditional on staying in academia, while the gender gap in publications is insignificant.

Contact person: Marina Chugunova

Subscription to the invitation mailing list and more information on the seminar page.

Joint Conference of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition with the Faculty of Law of the University of São Paulo (FDUSP)

Time information: Local time São Paulo (GMT-3)

Live broadcast on YouTube

Conference program as pdf

This paper analyzes the unexpected success of AlphaFold V1, an AI-based software program representing a publicly available and novel methodological advance within the “protein folding” (PF) subfield of computational biology. As a novel tool that represented a significant advance, AlphaFold V1 influenced the size and the expertise composition of academic research labs already producing similar software in the PF subfield. Specifically, AlphaFold V1 caused the principal investigators of established labs to reconsider the size, and the depth and breadth of expertise necessary to capitalize on the advance; and even to decide whether their labs should continue work in the PF subfield altogether. Results show that impacted labs adapted to the new methodological advance by becoming larger and broader in expertise. This study contributes findings on: (i) the mechanisms of new opportunity and increased competition that shape lab composition; (ii) the complexity of science at the frontier of human expertise and artificial intelligence; and (iii) the role of companies in the collective effort to produce scientific knowledge. The results carry implications for further research on the integration of disciplinary insights, the scaled computational capabilities enabled by artificial intelligence, and the organization of science itself.

Ansprechpartner: Michael E. Rose