Veranstaltungen

Moderation: Daria Kim

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

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

Family background matters for entrepreneurship; however, the focus on factors making siblings similar rather than different may hide important sources of heterogeneity and understate the total importance of families. In a set of causal exercises using Swedish register data, I assess the differential effects of birth order, family size, and sibling sex composition on entrepreneurship. These factors appear to have a negligible impact. While later born men are more likely to become unincorporated entrepreneurs, this effect is largely explained by their lower education, pointing towards the subsistence nature of this type of entrepreneurship. I find no evidence of causal family size effects in linear and non-linear instrumental variable approaches, although there is a small negative effect of having a brother on the father-daughter association in unincorporated entrepreneurship. Finally, neither source of within-family heterogeneity exhibits a clear relationship with incorporated entrepreneurship. The results are consistent with the absence of adult sibling peer effects in entrepreneurship and confirm the role of families in generating sibling similarities, not differences. The importance of family background for entrepreneurship is therefore only marginally understated, and accounting for within-family differences increases previously estimated sibling correlations by little.

Ansprechpartnerin: Laura Rosendahl Huber, Ph.D.

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

Abstract:
The digitization of economic activity has important socio-economic development implications and at the same time creates challenges for antitrust analysis. These implications and challenges have been met differently in jurisdictions around the world.  We analyze the different experiences in the EU and developing countries, focusing on mobile payments. We find that this market exhibits special characteristics that need to be taken into account in the analysis of competition conditions. First, it is enabled by mobile telecommunications infrastructure and is offered by network operators, which causes competition in both markets to be closely linked. Second, there is still regulatory arbitrage which potentially favors mobile payments. Third, there are factors, such as the lack of interoperability and geographical reach, that make network effects in this industry different from those present in other platforms. Fourth, since mobile payments in developing countries serve a niche—the population underserved by mainstream banking—the definition of the relevant market is not straightforward. We propose the criteria to be applied when making such definition. Finally, since mobile payments have associated financial services, there is an interaction between competition and financial stability that needs to be considered.

Hinweis: Dieses Seminar besitzt einen interdisziplinären Charakter und folgt einem neuartigem Format: Nach einem 30-minütigen Einführungsvortrag von Jörg und Paco werden wir uns während der Diskussion auf die ökonomischen Aspekte des Projekts konzentrieren.

Ansprechpartnerin: Zhaoxin Pu

Moderation: Dr. Natale Rampazzo

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

Abstract:
Generic penetration in the U.S. pharmaceutical market has increased, providing significant gains in consumer surplus. What impact has this had on the rate and direction of pharmaceutical innovation? While the overall level of drug development activity has increased, our estimates suggest a sizable, robust, negative relationship between rising generic penetration and early-stage pharmaceutical innovation in the same therapeutic areas. We also find that increasing generic penetration induces firms to shift their R&D activity towards more biologic-based products and away from chemical-based products. We conclude by discussing potential implications of our results for long-run welfare, policy, and innovation.

Ansprechpartnerin: Zhaoxin Pu

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

Abstract:
We study the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on total factor productivity (TFP) of domestic firms using a new, representative firm-level data set spanning six countries. A novel finding is that firm-level spillovers from foreign firms to domestic companies can be significantly positive, non-existent, or even negative, depending on which sectors receive FDI. When foreign firms produce in the same narrow sector as domestic firms, the latter are negatively affected by increasing competition and positively affected by knowledge spillovers. We find that the positive spillovers dominate if foreign firms enter sectors where firms are “technologically close,” controlling for the endogeneity of their entry decision into such sectors. Positive technology spillovers also affect firms in other sectors, if those sectors are technologically close to the sectors receiving FDI. Increasing FDI in sectors that are technologically close to other sectors boosts TFP of domestic firms by twice as much as increasing FDI by the same amount across all sectors.

Ansprechpartnerin: Zhaoxin Pu

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

In a natural field experiment with 900+ subjects in 300+ teams, we study the effects of choosing team members versus ideas on entrepreneurial team performance. We use a two-by-two design in which subjects are randomly assigned to one of four treatments in which they (i) choose their own team but not the idea they pursue; (ii) choose their own idea but not their team; (iii) choose both their team and the idea to pursue; or (iv) choose neither their team nor the idea. We find that teams who choose their own idea but not their members perform consistently better than those in the remaining treatments. We then explore a number of different channels that can account for this finding.

 
Ansprechpartner: Dr. Marco Kleine

Moderation: Luc Desaunettes

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

This talk will review the speaker’s and other researchers’ efforts to quantify technological change. Some challenges have been at least partially met but others are still outstanding. The important issues include what to measure (the dependent variable) and a variety of economic and technical measures will be considered with the conclusion that functional performance metrics are the most informative about what we want to learn. To quantify change, we also need to decide what the performance metrics theoretically depend upon (the independent variable). One obvious candidate is time but given work by Wright and many others, the presentation will also consider whether an effort variable such as cumulative demand/production or R&D spending improves the understanding of technological change. After making contestable decisions on the variables, the result for a wide variety of technological domains appears to be a generalization of Moore’s Law. However, this exponential relationship with time is quite noisy but more importantly, many (probably most) researchers of technological change do not find the generalized Moore’s Law (GML) acceptable. The final part of the presentation will be discussion and speculation about various reasons for this reality including practical utility, quantitative theoretical foundations and deep qualitative reasoning.

 
Ansprechpartner: Dr. Fabian Gaessler