Veranstaltungen

We investigate how firms adapt to trademark protection, an extensively used but underexamined form of IP protection, by exploring a historical precedent: China’s trademark law of 1923 ‒ an unanticipated and disapproved response to end foreign privileges in China. By exploiting a unique, newly digitized firm-employee-level dataset from Shanghai in 1872-1941, we show that the trademark law shaped firm dynamics on all sides of trademark conflicts. The law spurred growth and brand investment among Western firms with greater dependence on trademark protection. In contrast, Japanese businesses, which had frequently been accused of counterfeiting, experienced contractions while attempting to build their own brands after the law. The trademark law also led to new linkages with domestic agents, both within and outside the boundaries of Western firms, and the growth of Chinese intermediaries. At the aggregate level, trademark-intensive industries witnessed a net growth in employment and the number of product categories. A comparison with previous attempts by foreign powers ‒ such as extraterritorial rights, bilateral treaties, and an unenforced trademark code ‒ shows that those alternative institutions were ultimately unsuccessful.

Ansprechpartner: Klaus Keller

Innovators’ personal experience and social networks may affect their familiarity with customer needs, and in turn the types of products they bring to market. Consistent with this channel, we document that innovators create products that are more likely to be purchased by customers similar to them along observable dimensions including gender, age, and socio-economic status. With scanner data and a new phone applications database, we find that these homophily patterns hold even within detailed industries. Using quasi-random assignment of individuals to dorms during military service, we provide causal evidence that being exposed to peers from a lower income group increases an entrepreneur’s propensity to create necessity products. The finding is similar with an alternative research design leveraging idiosyncratic within-school variation in peer composition across classes and cohorts. Because innovators are predominantly men from privileged backgrounds, the social push channel implies that the gains from innovation are unequally distributed across customer groups, which we quantify in a growth model. (Joint work with Elias Einiö and Xavier Jaravel)

Ansprechpartner: Fabian Gaessler

Efficient access to existing knowledge is essential to technical advance, yet little is known about how access-enhancing institutions shape intertemporal knowledge spillovers. In this paper, I investigate the cumulative technological impact of the CNIDR AIDS Database, the first, disease-targeted, online repository of electronic patent documents, launched in 1994. Tracing references from subsequent patents, I find that the marginal impact of the repository was largest (+30%) among patents for which the established disease-link was previously non-obvious to detect through standard bibliographic search, in line with predictions of stronger reduction of search costs. Further findings suggest that increased visibility and attention to more “hidden” prior art particularly benefited private sector HIV researchers, and was reflected in enhanced diffusion of technological knowledge across scientific community and geographic boundaries.

Ansprechpartner: Fabian Gaessler

Gender pay inequality is a persistent feature of economies around the world, but whether and how it can be eliminated is poorly understood. We examine whether one proposed intervention for reducing the pay gap, salary transparency, influences gender pay inequality in the context of universities in Canada. We exploit the passing of a salary disclosure policy in one province, which significantly lowered the cost of monitoring gender inequality in public organizations. We find that, on average, salary disclosure reduces gender pay inequality. However, institutions respond to mandatory salary disclosure in different ways. Those that anticipate higher scrutiny ‒ top ranked institutions and those that faced higher historic gender inequality ‒ are more likely to improve their gender pay gap, despite facing low public scrutiny in the periods immediately after the policy. They do so by increasing female salary and decreasing male salary relative to institutions in provinces without salary disclosure. In contrast, institutions that anticipate lower external scrutiny only increase female salary. Furthermore, we show these responses to address gender pay inequality negatively correlate with other organizational outcomes, such male faculty retention and grant productivity, and the size of these effects correspond to the differential response by top and non-top ranked institutions. Combined, these findings suggest that implementing salary transparency may lead to heterogeneous responses by organizations in how they reduce the gender gap, which may have unintended consequences on other organizational outcomes.

Ansprechpartnerin: Marina Chugunova

Tough Bargains: When Cooperation Is More Competitive than Competition
Presenter: Joachim Henkel (TUM)
Discussant: Timm Opitz (Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb)

Open-Border Policy and Knowledge Diffusion
Presenter: Rainer Widmann (Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb)
Discussant: Georg Windisch (TUM)

Multinational Firms and Global Innovation
Presenter: Cristina Rujan (Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb)
Discussant: Alexey Rusakov (LMU Munich School of Management)

Competition for Attention on Information Platforms: The Case of Local News Outlets
Presenter: Tim Meyer (LMU Munich School of Management)
Discussant: Lucia Baur (TUM)

We estimate the impact of the inflow of inventors on the formation and success of local venture-backed startups, strengthening causality with a shift-share instrument based on the historic spatial distribution of millions of inventor surnames in the 1940 U.S. Census. Arrival of inventors increases the number of venture-backed startups, but only in the same technology fields of the newly-arrived inventors — and at the expense of other fields. Inventor arrivals boost the number of successful startups — including $1B+ “unicorn” exits — while reducing bankruptcies and “fire-sale” acquisitions. The improvement is also driven by a reallocation of venture capital away from investment in low-tech startups, especially unsuccessful ones.

Ansprechpartnerin: Marina Chugunova

There is an ongoing debate around whether or not universities produce too many PhD students in light of the limited number of available permanent faculty positions. A body of literature has emerged that investigate the destinations and career preferences of PhD students, but has neglected the importance of graduates’ job satisfaction, which is vital for an employee to be productive and to contribute to society. This paper contributes to our current understanding of the job market for academics by comparing job satisfaction and motivations of PhD holders outside of academia (industry or government) to those in academia, and by comparing job satisfaction and motivations of PhD holders compared to PhD drop-outs. We rely on a unique survey of 608 PhD grant applicants at the FNR and, in line with prior research, find a strong preference for intrinsic motivations and jobs in academia. We also show that many graduates leave academia and that this does not result in lower job satisfaction. However, there are distinct job satisfaction profiles, in terms of job attributes, for different sectors. These findings are of relevance to employers and policy as they inform them on job match of graduates and on the opportunity cost of pursuing a PhD. (Joint work with Cornelia Lawson, University of Manchester)

Ansprechpartner: Rainer Widmann

Prior management research has provided extensive evidence that organizational members who identify with their organization tend to support its norms and objectives by displaying behaviors that are in-line with or beyond organizational expectations. We question whether this account of observable in-role or extra-role behaviors is complete and study organizational identification dynamics in a series of secret, unauthorized innovation projects (so-called “bootlegging” projects) within a technology-driven multinational firm. In contrast to prior research, our findings suggest that organizational identification may sometimes lead members to deliberately violate organizational norms in a struggle to support their organization. More specifically, we find that organizational identification turns out to simultaneously motivate both overt in-role and secret counter-role behaviors which, at first sight, appear to be conflicting as they both draw on the member’s scarce resources. However, our results reveal that both behaviors really complement each other and thus create an interesting, hitherto unexplored organizational paradox. We then move on to also study how a member’s organizational identification may change when performing the secret innovation project and uncover the critical role of managerial responses for successfully sustaining and strengthening organizational identification of members who are both, loyal members and loose mavericks at the same time. (joint with Philipp Bubenzer)

Ansprechpartner: Rainer Widmann

We study the participation of nascent firms in open-source communities and its implications for attracting VC funding. To do so, we exploit unique data on 160,065 US startups linking information from Crunchbase to firms' GitHub accounts. Estimating a within-startup model saturated with a host of relevant fixed effects, we show that startups accelerate their activities on the platform in the twelve months prior to raising their first financing round. The intensity of their involvement on GitHub declines in the twelve months after. Remarkably, startups intensify those activities that rely on external technology sources above and beyond the technologies they themselves control. Applying machine learning to classify GitHub projects, we find that the most prevalent among these external activities are related to software development, data analytics, and integration. Our results indicate that VCs and renowned investors are the most responsive to these activities. (Joint work with Christian Peukert, HEC Lausanne, and Maria Roche, Harvard Business School)

Ansprechpartner: Fabian Gaessler