Events

Title and abstract will follow.

Contact person: Elisabeth Hofmeister

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

Title and abstract will follow.

C0ntact person: Daehyun Kim

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

More information will follow soon.

Contact person: Elisabeth Hofmeister

Title and abstract will follow soon.

Contact person: Elisabeth Hofmeister

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, University of Lausanne, Cornell 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.

Further information on the website of the MSI.

The workshop will cover the MSI’s three focus areas:

• Digitalization, Strategy and Organization
• Innovation and Entrepreneurship
• Law & Economics of Intellectual Property, Innovation & Digitalization

Like the Munich Summer Institute, the MSI Ph.D. Workshop will focus on quantitative empirical research. In the workshop, participants will present their working papers, receive comments from senior scholars, and discuss their papers with other participants. Participants are expected to have read all presented papers. The number of participants is limited to 12. Discussants will be senior scholars who participate in the Munich Summer Institute’s main conference.

How does industrial policy affect technological change? To analyze this question, we focus on a period of unprecedented state intervention: the economic system of Nazi Germany. After 1933, the government not only tightened and introduced market restrictions, such as foreign exchange and domestic price controls, but also subsidized private investment in autarky and armament industries on a large scale. While previous research has focused on estimating aggregate investment in these industries and the extent to which private firms were forced to invest by the state, this paper analyzes the impact of these policies on R&D activities and, consequently, on technological change. To analyze the direction of technological change, we use a newly constructed patent dataset that includes a sample of over 80,200 patents filed between 1928 and 1941. We use these data to analyze three main research questions. First, did the promotion of investment in autarky industries (e.g. fuel production or ore mining) and armament industries increase patenting in the technology classes associated with these industries? Second, do we observe an increase in the importance of state-owned enterprises or military institutions for R&D? Third, do we find evidence of a change in the direction of R&D activities within large firms? 

Contact person: Michael Rose

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

Medical devices are critical to the delivery of health care, but malfunctioning products can pose a threat to patients, necessitating product recalls. In addition to the direct effects of medical device recalls, such as public health protection and negative reputational and financial consequences for the recalling firm, there may be spillover effects on product development. In particular, the vacuum left by the recalled product and its reputational damage may incentivize competing firms to introduce new medical devices to the market. This study examines the impact of serious medical device recalls on subsequent new product development by competitors, as measured by new medical device submissions to the FDA. We compile data from three regulatory databases representing 11,724 new product submissions and 2,647 recalls for 7,208 unique medical device firms over a 17-year period. Using a fixed effect model and institutional features of the FDA’s clearance process, we find that serious recalls increase other firms’ new product submissions in the affected product market. We estimate that a single recall in a product market increases subsequent submissions by approximately eight percent. Moreover, we find that this relationship is attenuated in markets with more competitors. Our results indicate that firms may currently undervalue actions to avoid product recalls, and that the medical device market may be improved by regulatory efforts to enhance transparency in the recall process.

Contact person: Elisabeth Hofmeister

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

Title and abstract will follow soon.

Contact person: Elisabeth Hofmeister

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

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology demonstrate considerable potential to complement human capital intensive activities. While an emerging literature documents wide-ranging productivity effects of AI, relatively little attention has been paid to how AI might change the nature of work itself. How do individuals, especially those in the knowledge economy, adjust how they work when they start using AI? Using the setting of open source software, we study individual level effects that AI has on task allocation. We exploit a natural experiment arising from the deployment of GitHub Copilot, a generative AI code completion tool for software developers. Leveraging millions of work activities over a two year period, we use a program eligibility threshold to investigate the impact of AI technology on the task allocation of software developers within a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity design. We find that having access to Copilot induces such individuals to shift task allocation towards their core work of coding activities and away from non-core project management activities. We identify two underlying mechanisms driving this shift - an increase in autonomous rather than collaborative work, and an increase in exploration activities rather than exploitation. The main effects are greater for individuals with relatively lower ability. Overall, our estimates point towards a large potential for AI to transform work processes and to potentially flatten organizational hierarchies in the knowledge economy.

Contact person: Cheng Li

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