Events

We study the welfare implications of the rise of common ownership in the United States from 1995 to 2021. We build a general equilibrium model with a hedonic demand system in which firms compete in a network game of oligopoly. Firms are connected through two large networks: the first reflects ownership overlap, the second product market rivalry. In our model, common ownership of competing firms induces unilateral incentives to soften competition and the magnitude of the common ownership effect depends on how much the two networks overlap. We estimate our model for the universe of U.S. public corporations using a combination of firm financials, investor holdings, and text-based product similarity data. We perform counterfactual calculations to evaluate how the efficiency and the distributional impact of common ownership have evolved over time. According to our estimates the welfare cost of common ownership, measured as the ratio of deadweight loss to total surplus, has increased about ninefold between 1995 and 2021. Under various corporate governance models the deadweight loss of common ownership ranges between 3.5% and 13.2% of total surplus in 2021. The rise of common ownership has also resulted in a significant reallocation of surplus from consumers to producers.

Contact person: Marina Chugunova

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We examine how reviewer–applicant social ties (department and university affiliation, co-author/co-applicant relationships, research field similarity) influence reviewer evaluations, based on Japanese research grant administrative data (2005–2016). All relationships between social ties and scores are positively correlated, even after accounting for unobservable applicant characteristics and proposal quality. Regarding bias and information advantage effects, upward deviation from department match negatively correlates with applicants’ future research outputs, implying bias. Upward deviation from research field similarity or university match positively correlates with future productivity, indicating that information advantage predicts applicants’ future productivity. 

Contact person: Marina Chugunova

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The international mobility of researchers has been central to the agenda of policy-makers for several decades. Despite the growing presence of mobility grants within public funding agencies' portfolios, empirical evidence on their effects remains scant. In this paper, we contribute to the literature by studying the Marie Curie fellowships, the flagship program of the EU, providing competitive grants to early-stage researchers to spend a research period abroad. Based on data for the universe of applicants to the Seventh Framework Programme (2007-2013), we exploit the discontinuity in grant assignment to uncover causal effects on individual researchers. Results show that grants are indeed conducive to higher chances of experiencing mobility towards the scientists' country of choice. Conversely, we do not find systematic evidence that grants on average lead to increases in publication quantity or quality, nor improved career progression. Finally, we document interesting heterogeneous effects: grants supporting extra-European mobility, as opposed to those supporting mobility within Europe, generally yield more positive effects across most outcomes. This suggests that grants are most effective when targeting mobility flows subject to larger frictions. (co-authors: Stefano Baruffaldi, Yevgeniya Shevtsova)

Contact person: David Heller

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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 – Intellectual Property Data in Ukraine
 

Panel 2 – Health and Medical Innovation Data
 

Panel 3 – Innovation Activity, Entrepreneurship and Industry Data in Ukraine
 

Panel 4 – Data for the Research on Science in Ukraine

Program as pdf

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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