Events

The Swedish system has for long been one of the most generous with respect to family parental leave policies in the world. Is there evidence that this system raises women's possibilities of an academic career? I present new longitudinal evidence for more than 11,000 first-time fathers and mothers, examining survival chances with a focus on the characterizing the gender gap in terms of wages and publications. Descriptive statistics show that women in the Swedish system are somewhat behind men in their academic career in terms of publication rate and positional advancement before having children, which is in part due to their younger age. After their first child, the publication gap between men and women is substantially widened across all fields, conditional on staying in academia, while this drop is not nearly as severe for wages.  Women have only slightly lower survival chances than men after their first child. In recent years, parental leave has become more equally shared between fathers and mother, but I find no evidence that this trend has lowered child penalty rates for women in publications, rather the opposite. This suggests that a more equal distribution of parental leave may not be a panacea to improving women's career prospects in academia. 

Contact person: Rainer Widmann

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On 18/19 December 2023, the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition will host the 6th Research on Innovation, Science and Entrepreneurship Workshop (RISE6), an annual workshop for Ph.D. students and Junior Post-docs in Economics and Management. 

The goal of the RISE6 Workshop is to stimulate an in-depth discussion of a select number of empirical research papers. It offers Ph.D. students and Junior Post-docs an opportunity to present their work and to receive feedback.

Keynote speaker of the RISE6 Workshop is Ina Ganguli (UMass Amherst).

See the Program RISE6.

For more information see RISE Workshop.

Boundary-Spanning Technology Search, Product Component Reuse, and New Product Innovation: Evidence from the Smartphone Industry
Presenter: Kyung Yul Lee (TUM) (co-authored with H. J. Jung and Y. Kwon)
Discussant: Mingpei Li (Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition)

How Complementarities between Technology, Environmental Compliance, and Management Practices Drive Firm Productivity: Evidence from German Firms
Presenter: Elisa Gerten (ISTO)
Discussant: Pietro Fantini (TUM)

Research productivity depends on the ability to discern whether an idea is promising, and a willingness to abandon the ones that are not. Economists know little about this process, however, because empirical studies of innovation typically begin with a sample of issued patents or published papers that were already selected from a pool of promising ideas. This paper unpacks the idea selection process using a unique dataset from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a voluntary organization that develops protocols for managing Internet infrastructure. For a large sample of IETF proposals, we observe a sequence of decisions to either revise, publish, or abandon the project, along with changes to the proposal and the demographics of the author team. Using these data, we provide a descriptive analysis of how R&D is conducted within the IETF, and estimate a dynamic discrete choice model whose key parameters measure the speed at which author teams learn whether they have a good (i.e., publishable) idea. The estimates imply that sixty percent of IETF proposals are publishable, but only one-third of the good ideas survive the review process. Author experience and increased attention from the IETF community are associated with faster learning. Finally, we simulate two innovation policies: a research subsidy and a publication-prize. Subsidies have a larger impact on research output, though prizes perform better when accounting for researchers’ opportunity costs.

Contact person: David Heller

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Data is a central resource of and multiple-use production factor in the 21^st century. Data creation, data processing, data use, and data transfer is – in the words of data geopolitics – inherently linked to the competitiveness of not only economies, but also of societies. Nevertheless, the quest for an adequate and balanced governance framework is on-going – whereby data governance does not only, but also encompasses hard and soft law regulation. The respective field of data law is emerging and not yet fully ‘surveyed’, still in the process of making as well as fragmented along the lines of existing rules and recent policy efforts. The legal (and infrastructural) taxonomy is in flux and an inherent element of modern-day data strategies worldwide.

Underlining this global nature of data governance, the conference is aimed at a truly global view on data law instruments – where the current EU pieces of legislation (inter alia the General Data Protection Regulation as well as the Data Governance Act and the proposed Data Act) are only one of many approaches. Most important, the conference is devoted to a contextual – and a decolonial comparative law – approach to data regulation – including cultural, economic, and infrastructural dimensions of data governance and linking perspectives from the global north and global south as well from liberal and authoritarian settings.

The conference is co-organized by the University of Passau Research Centre for Law and Digitalisation (FREDI) and the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. The event is the final part of a three-tier conference series on Global Data Law and element of a greater research agenda with respect to Global Data Law & Policy.

Visit the website on the Conference Series on Global Data Law.
 

Program as pdf

Registration is open up to and including 26 November 2023.

Benedict Probst presents his vision for the independent research group, which will be hosted at the Institute. He gives first an overview of his background and his past academic work. Then, he speaks about his plans for the group and gives an overview of the envisaged research projects.

The transfer of knowledge has not changed fundamentally for many hundreds of years: It is usually document-based-formerly printed on paper as a classic essay and nowadays as PDF. With around 2.5 million new research contributions every year, researchers drown in a flood of pseudo-digitized PDF publications. As a result research and innovation is seriously weakened. We argue for representing research contributions in a structured and semantic way as a knowledge graph. The advantage is that information represented in a knowledge graph is readable by machines and humans. As an example, we give an overview on the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), a service implementing this approach. For creating the knowledge graph representation, we rely on a mixture of manual (crowd/expert sourcing) and (semi-)automated techniques. Only with such a combination of human and machine intelligence, we can achieve the required quality of the representation to allow for novel exploration and assistance services for researchers. As a result, a scholarly knowledge graph such as the ORKG can be used to give a condensed overview on the state-of-the-art addressing a particular research quest, for example as a tabular comparison of contributions according to various characteristics of the approaches. Further possible intuitive access interfaces to such scholarly knowledge graphs include domain-specific (chart) visualizations or answering of natural language questions.

Contact person:  Marina Chugunova

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Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) I is a technology that can create novel, original and inventive content based on users input or data. AI has become a powerful and disruptive force in various domains, especially in the pharma-biotech industry, where it can accelerate drug discovery, optimize clinical trials, and improve patient outcomes. However, the use of AI also raises complex and unresolved issues regarding patent inventorship and ownership. While some jurisdictions have explicitly excluded AI from being an inventor, there is still uncertainty on how humans can claim inventorship on the inventive contributions of AI. This presentation will explore the question of inventive contribution in an invention and its impact on inventorship from a pharma-biotech perspective. The talk further discusses how different jurisdiction’s patent law define an ‘invention’ and an ‘inventor’, and how this can address the challenges posed by AI-assisted inventions. This talk will also explore the case of the Artificial Inventor Project, and how different courts have rejected the argument of AI inventor. Finally, this talk will propose recommendations for a future framework model that addresses some of the patent inventorship and ownership issues posed by AI in the age of generative innovation.

About Pratap Devarapalli

Dr. Pratap Devarapalli MSc, LLM, PhD is an Intellectual Property Strategist and Patent researcher. He has expertise in dealing with Intellectual Property issues in relation to emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, 3D bioprinting and synthetic biology. He is currently a Postdoctoral fellow at TC Bernie School of Law, University of Queensland, Australia. Pratap pursued his doctoral studies from the Centre for Law and Genetics, University of Tasmania, Australia where his research was focused on “Patenting issues related to Bioprinted tissues and Bioinks”. He was invited by Government of Japan to assist Japanese Patent Office in harmonizing of Japanese Patent Law in relation AI. He pursued his Master of Law (LLM) in Intellectual Property from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Geneva and the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He is the recipient of the prestigious International Fellowship offered by WIPO. He holds a Master's degree in Genomics and a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology, Microbiology, and Chemistry. Pratap also holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Patent informatics from the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research at the CSIR Unit of Research and Development of Information Products, India and worked as a Patent researcher in the same.

Multinational companies are affected by tax reforms both at home and abroad. We study the effect of foreign corporate tax reforms on domestic employment and wages. To do this, we link the universe of Norwegian firm-level foreign direct investment (FDI) data with the universe of Norwegian individual tax returns. Exploiting the staggered implementation of tax reforms in foreign countries which affect the subsidiaries of Norwegian firms, we find that domestically-owned Norwegian firms see domestic salaries increase by 2.4% following foreign tax cuts. We conclude that if all foreign profits are repatriated, approximately 18% of the foreign tax burden is borne by workers.

Contact person: David Heller

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Mobility of scientists has been increasingly recognized as a strategy to favor recombination of ideas and innovative research. However, our knowledge of patterns of migration of scientists, as well as their determinants, remains limited. We measure migration of scholars based on information on changes in their institutional affiliations over time, using metadata on over 36 million journal articles and reviews indexed by Scopus. Specifically, we produce a database of annual international migration flows of scholars, for all countries, from 1998-2017 (the “Scholarly Migration Database”). We use the newly generated database to provide evidence on the relationship between economic development and the emigration propensity of scholars, and to assess patterns and trends of gender inequalities in international mobility. Initial key results and potential further developments for this project will be presented.

Contact person: Michael E. Rose

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