Veranstaltungen

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

Die Veranstaltungssprache ist Englisch.

Policy- and law-making in the field of intellectual property (IP) is about drawing a line between excludability and non-excludability of results of creative and innovative activity. The rationales for such boundaries stem from various theories about innovation, creativity, and social well-being.  The question of where to draw a line often becomes a matter of balancing competing interests and policy objectives.

The workshop will explore the challenges of this exercise in the context of EU IP law. It will stimulate the participants to view IP law and policy as a ‘work in progress’ rather than being ‘cast in stone’ and consider how the IP framework could be improved.  

5 November 2021 – 10:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

• Theoretical foundations of IP law
• Critical perspectives on IP
• IP policy levers
• IP law from a law-in-social-context perspective

In-person if possible or hybrid format

Enrollment: Maximum 25 Participants

Webpage of Daria Kim