Veranstaltungen

Online-Veranstaltung (auf Einladung)

Defying global trends, non-university public research organizations (PROs) continue to be key players in Germanys research landscape. As part of their activities, they provide the work environment for large numbers of Ph.D. students who are then graduated by universities. Similarly, private-sector firms employ substantial numbers of industrial Ph.D. students. Both PROs and the private sector thus help provide human capital for the German system of research and innovation, even though their contribution has been difficult to assess due to limited data availability. In this paper, we employ a unique dataset based on a large-scale record linkage approach to trace how the roles of PROs and firms in doctoral training developed over the past two decades. Our results for about 50,000 STEM Ph.D.s graduated from 1995 to 2013 indicate that across cohorts, increasing shares of STEM Ph.D.s remain employed in academia upon graduation. This trend is accompanied by diminishing shares of Ph.D.s obtaining high incomes, and it is even more pronounced for PhDs who did their dissertation research at PROs. In contrast, we observe a low and over time decreasing probability of industrial PhDs to migrate into academia. Despite reforms aimed at increasing the vertical differentiation of the university sector, our data do not suggest an increasing premium of being trained at top-tier universities. We also study the attainment of leadership and research positions and analyze a subsample of regionally immobile Ph.D.s to explore how strategic location choices relate to the observed patterns.

Ansprechpartner: Michael E. Rose

Online-Veranstaltung (auf Einladung)

We assess the heterogeneous impact of economic downturns on individuals’ decisions to bring high-technology ideas to the market in the form of new ventures. We thereby examine how worsening labor market conditions influence individuals’ opportunity costs of starting new ventures, the resulting composition of the entrepreneurial pool, and startup performance outcomes. Using a rich dataset of startup founders in the biotechnology and medical device sectors, we find that an increase in the unemployment rate is associated with a substantial rise in the share of entrepreneurs who are most sensitive to worsening labor market conditions. Additionally, we find that startups founded by these entrepreneurs display lower financial and innovative performance than startups founded by entrepreneurs who are relatively insensitive to business cycles. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that individuals’ heterogeneous response to worsening labor market conditions is a relevant factor in explaining the negative relationship between unemployment and startup performance outcomes. (Joint work with Annamaria Conti, HEC Lausanne)

Ansprechpartner: Felix Pöge

Online-Veranstaltung (auf Einladung)

Does the added attention associated with scientific prizes have a positive impact on citations to winners’ pre-award articles? The answer has implications for how prizes influence innovation, and whether trade-offs exist when award frequency changes. Using article level citation data associated with matched winner/control paper pairs, we find that the Nobel Prize announcements in economics result in substantial citation benefits for pre-award papers. These benefits are increasing in the distance from the core economics audience. Insiders pay greatest attention to consensus papers cited by the Nobel Prize Committee and written by past Clark Medal winners; outsiders focus more on consensus papers not written by Clark Medal awardees. In both cases, the entry of new citing authors accounts for most of the enhanced attention. We also examine the direct impact of the Clark Medal on citations and find effects comparable to those arising with the Nobel Prize. (Joint work with Zakaria Babutsidze, SKEMA)

Ansprechpartner: Felix Pöge

Online-Veranstaltung (auf Einladung)

Laws protecting intellectual property rights balance interests of earlier and later rights holders. The tradeoffs are well established for patents. We argue that similar considerations apply to trademarks. Jurisdictions differ in how strongly they protect earlier rights, with EU trademark law protecting the registered use of an earlier right for much longer than US trademark law. Laws in both jurisdictions seek to eventually align registered use of earlier rights with their actual use, creating space on the trademark register for later rights. Data from a recent reform of trademark fees reveal that registered and actual use of EU marks frequently fail to align as intended. We analyse trademark opposition cases at EUIPO to test whether this creates costs for owners of later rights. We find that a subset of firms relies on the protection afforded to earlier rights to permanently expand the breadth of their marks beyond actual use, limiting access to trademarks for later applicants. We discuss policy implications. (Joint work with Stuart J.H. Graham, Georgia Tech, and Amanda Myers, USPTO)

Ansprechpartner: Fabian Gaessler

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, Raum E10

Moderation: Aaron Stumpf

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

We conducted a field experiment to identify the causal effects of extrinsic incentive cues on the sorting and performance of nascent social entrepreneurs. The experiment, carried out with one of the United Kingdom's largest support agencies for social entrepreneurs, encouraged 431 nascent social entrepreneurs to submit a full application for a grant competition that provides cash and in-kind mentorship support through a one-time mailing sent by the agency. The applicants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: one group received a standard mailing that emphasized the intrinsic incentives of the program, or the opportunity to do good (Social treatment), and the other two groups received a mailing that instead emphasized the extrinsic incentives - either the financial rewards (Cash treatment) or the in-kind rewards (Support treatment). Our results show that an emphasis on extrinsic incentives strongly affects who applies for the grant and consequently the type of submissions received. The extrinsic reward cues "crowded out" the more prosocial candidates, leading fewer candidates to apply and fewer applicants targeting disadvantaged groups. Importantly, while the full applications submitted by candidates in the extrinsic incentives groups were more successful in receiving the grant, their social enterprises were less likely to be successful at the end of the one-year grant period. Our results highlight the critical role of intrinsic motives to the selection and performance of social enterprises and suggest that using extrinsic incentives to promote the development of successful social enterprises may backfire in the longer run. (Joint work with Ina Ganguli and Chloé Le Coq)

Ansprechpartnerin: Dr. Marina Chugunova

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

Despite increasing gender equality across many domains women remain underrepresented in leading positions. In two experiments, we study whether one reason for this gender gap may be that women are less effective in eliciting coordinated support from followers. Both experiments use coordination games, in which a leader must convince followers to select a particular equilibrium. Our first experiment employs a widely used paradigm to study leader effectiveness, the minimum-effort coordination game, while the second uses a novel game to more directly compare the strength of requests from male versus female leaders. While we find, using explicit and implicit attitude measures, that our participants possess stereotypical associations between gender and leadership, we find no evidence that such bias impacts actual leadership performance. We show that this absence of an effect is surprising, relative to the priors of expert researchers (joint work with Eva Ranehill and Roberto Weber).

Ansprechpartnerin: Dr. Marina Chugunova

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

When international patent applications are examined sequentially at different patent offices, examiners at following offices may be able to take advantage on the earlier results provided by another office. By way of focusing on rejection citations added by examiners for a set of triadic patent families, this study examines the influence (spillover) of patent examinations across patent offices. Variations over examiners as well as outcome on the applicants’ responses to the examiner disposals will be discussed.

Ansprechpartner: Michael E. Rose

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, Raum E10

Moderation: Tobias Endrich-Laimböck

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

Recently, a new class of bibliometric indicators has been introduced, which are intended to measure whether a scientific publication is disruptive to a field or tradition of research. Disruptiveness is connected to the ‘scientific revolutions’ concept of Thomas S. Kuhn and refers to exceptional research which is characterized by an overthrow of established thinking. The general approach that all of these indicators build upon is rooted in patent analysis and considers the relations of citing papers and cited references for a given focal paper in the citation network. This seminar will give an overview of the different indicators following this approach and present results that allow a first assessment of whether they measure what they propose to measure. Our results suggest that a modified version of the indicators proposed so far could improve the ability to measure the disruptiveness of papers.

Ansprechpartner: Fabian Gaessler