Events

This paper quantifies the role of family background in who becomes an inventor in India — using the information content in surnames. Indian surnames typically contain information about one’s caste, religion, or geographic origin. Based on records of all adult Indians alive (~850 million individuals), a national survey of 130 million families, and historical registers from the British India civil service and university graduates in the 1850s, we develop a novel dataset to track inequality between family groups over time and space in India. We find that based on family background alone, the bottom two-thirds of India’s population (~1 billion individuals) have a very low chance of becoming an entrepreneur, inventor, scientist, or even participating in national entrance exams for top universities. This pattern is unique to India with no other major country having nearly as much name-based advantage in outcomes. Integrating marginalized communities will not only benefit the excluded communities within India but will also enable India to enhance its aggregate contribution to the global economy and to the knowledge frontier.
(Joint work with Ruchir Agarwal)

Contact person: Albert Roger

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Patent protection was introduced for plant biotechnology in the United States in 1985, and it affected crops differentially depending on their reproductive structures. Exploiting this unique feature of plant physiology and a new dataset of crop-specific technology development, I find that the introduction of patent rights increased the development of novel plant varieties in affected crops. Technology development was driven by a rapid increase in private sector investment, was accompanied by positive spillover effects on innovation in certain non-biological agricultural technologies, and led to an increase in crop yields. Patent rights, however, could come with potentially significant costs to the consumers of technology and distortions to downstream production. Nevertheless, I document that in US counties that were more exposed to the change in patent law because of their crop composition, land values and profits increased. Taken together, the results suggest that the prospect of patent protection spurred technological progress and increased downstream productivity and profits.

Contact person: Albert Roger

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The Swedish system has for long been one of the most generous with respect to family parental leave policies in the world. Is there evidence that this system raises women's possibilities of an academic career? I present new longitudinal evidence for more than 11,000 first-time fathers and mothers, examining survival chances with a focus on the characterizing the gender gap in terms of wages and publications. Descriptive statistics show that women in the Swedish system are somewhat behind men in their academic career in terms of publication rate and positional advancement before having children, which is in part due to their younger age. After their first child, the publication gap between men and women is substantially widened across all fields, conditional on staying in academia, while this drop is not nearly as severe for wages.  Women have only slightly lower survival chances than men after their first child. In recent years, parental leave has become more equally shared between fathers and mother, but I find no evidence that this trend has lowered child penalty rates for women in publications, rather the opposite. This suggests that a more equal distribution of parental leave may not be a panacea to improving women's career prospects in academia. 

Contact person: Rainer Widmann

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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 Institute for Innovation and Competition)

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.

Contact person: David Heller

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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.

Contact person:  Marina Chugunova

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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.

Contact person: David Heller

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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.

Contact person: Michael E. Rose

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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)

Contact person: Rainer Widmann