Veranstaltungen

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-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb)

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.

Ansprechpartner: David Heller

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

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.

Ansprechpartnerin:  Marina Chugunova

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

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.

Ansprechpartner: David Heller

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

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.

Ansprechpartner: Michael E. Rose

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

Reported numbers of observed scientific misconduct, e.g. through retracted articles, are increasing at an alarming rate. The detected cases, however, only present the tip of the iceberg because the actual amount of scientific misconduct is impossible to observe. Fraud in science is professionally and socially unaccepted and leads to sanctions for the culpable scientists so that misconducting scientists try to hide their fraudulent actions. This means that ultimately, the size of the population of misconducting authors remains elusive and, as such, presents a “dark number.”
We estimate the size of the population of misconducting authors in medical and health sciences, drawing on capture-recapture methods. We find that the population size of misconducting authors in medical and health sciences is about 4,000 and therewith much larger than the cases that are detected. This finding calls for more transparency through data sharing among peers and author responsibility assignment. (joint with Maikel Pellens)

Ansprechpartner: Rainer Widmann

We investigate the impact of misconduct on the financing and exit opportunities of entrepreneurial ventures that are technologically related to the misconduct perpetrators. To do so, we consider all reported misconduct cases affecting US startups during 1998-2020 and estimate differences-in-differences models saturated with fixed effects. We show that startups producing similar technologies as the misconduct perpetrators become less likely to obtain financing and raise smaller amounts after the misconduct event is reported in the news, relative to startups developing dissimilar technologies located outside the perpetrators state. The strongest negative effects of misconduct are found to be associated with technological misconduct and sexual harassment, followed by financial fraud, while misconducts related to intellectual property infringements have statistically insignificant impact. Startups related to misconduct perpetrators are no less likely to be acquired than unrelated startups.

Ansprechpartner: Daehyun Kim

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

Startup Role in Post-war Rebuilding of the Ukrainian Economy (Iuliia Gernego, Kyiv National Economic University)
Innovative Entrepreneurship in Turbulent Times of War in Ukraine (Tetiana Shkoda, Kyiv National Economic University)

This paper shows that gender inequality affects the extent to which scientific ideas are used to develop new technologies. Despite strong incentives to select the most promising ideas, we claim that inventors are more likely to build on men’s rather than women’s science. We exploit the occurrence of simultaneous discoveries – i.e., instances when a man and a woman publish the same idea around the same time – and track the citations that those papers receive in patented inventions. The papers led by female scientists receive on average 40% fewer patent citations than their male-led twin. We examine several explanations for this gender gap in inventors’ attention. The pattern of results is consistent with inventors’ value expectations being a driver of the attention gap, beyond differences in the salience, overall productivity, and academic impact of scientists’ research. These findings have implications for our understanding of frictions in science-based technology development, as well as for broader theories of how gender inequality shapes cumulative innovation.

Ansprechpartner: Michael Rose

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf Seminarseite.