Events

Recent research and policy initiatives suggest that entrepreneurship serves as a pathway for reintegrating ex-felons into the labor market by reducing the stigma they face among prospective employers. However, the long-term outcomes of entrepreneurial careers for individuals with criminal records remain poorly understood. Using Danish administrative data, we investigate how the type of sentences received by individuals convicted of crimes relates to their subsequent labor market trajectories and, particularly, their transition into entrepreneurship. We study how community service sentences, as an alternative to imprisonment, shape ex-felons’ labor market trajectories and long-term outcomes. We find that individuals sentenced with community service are significantly less likely to engage in entrepreneurship than comparable individuals who were incarcerated instead. This aligns with prior research pointing to entrepreneurship as an alternative employment pathway for those stigmatized in the labor market. Importantly, we also find that ex-felons who turn to entrepreneurship - especially after having been incarcerated - suffer a persistent income disadvantage afterwards and exhibit higher rates of recidivism than those who find regular employment. Hence, our findings question how effective entrepreneurship can be as a social mobility and reintegration pathway for individuals with criminal records.

Contact person: Svenja Friess

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Ukraine has been engaged in the process of harmonising its statistical information for over a decade. However, this process is far from complete. In many cases, Ukrainian official statistics employs the same definitions as those used in OECD countries, but the methods of collecting data and calculations are not in line with international standards. This can be illustrated by the following examples of full-time equivalent (FTE) calculations for human R&D potential and expenditures on R&D. The Ukrainian State Statistical Service (SSS) does not provide data on the financing of STI in comparable formats, which makes it difficult to assess the dynamics of corresponding processes. This is further complicated by the restricted access to the initial information, which has two aspects. Firstly, the construction of samples is not always justified, as not all groups of innovative enterprises are represented in the surveys in an appropriate manner. Secondly, there is limited access to data from individual research organisations and innovative enterprises. Furthermore, official statistics contain some ‘obsolete’ indicators, while modern ones are not used due to certain formal reasons. This situation must be rectified, and the SSS will need to adopt more flexible procedures to accelerate the process of European integration in research and innovation statistics. The utilisation of official statistics for the evaluation of the performance of research organisations is an example of an attempt to implement international standards in this area. These issues and opportunities will be discussed in greater detail within this research presentation.

Contact person: Anastasiia Lutsenko

Firms have increasingly been competing through design. We show how computer vision techniques can be leveraged to measure the visual similarity of design rights across large data sets of product design images. Thus we extract and standardize 611,810 unique design images embedded in US design rights (1976–2020), adapt the structural similarity index measure to quantify design similarities between images, and rigorously validate the resulting design rights similarity measure. We then use that measure to produce novel empirical evidence that the similarity density of a design space exhibits an inverted U-shape with respect to the likelihood of that space’s design rights being litigated—a relationship proposed previously but never tested. Our design rights similarity measure should facilitate the exploration of new research questions in the fields of design rights, innovation, and strategy. We grant open access to our code and data resources to encourage research in these areas. 
(co-authored with Tian Cian and Cornelia Storz)

Contact person: David Heller

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We define the concept of moral cost of carbon (MCC): the internal carbon price that individuals implicitly apply to their consumption decisions. We argue that the MCC is a key metric for policy design. The gap between MCC and an actual carbon price tells us how much the carbon externality should be priced. It also reveals the political barriers to implementing a broad-based carbon pricing scheme. We propose an experimental approach to  measure the MCC among a target population. A key challenge is that information gaps and the choice environment could have large impacts and confound its elicitation. Our experimental design aims to address these problems. In particular, we show how malleable the MCC is with respect to extrinsic incentives.
(Co-authored by Sébastien Houde, Joachim Schleich, Corinne Faure)

Contact person: Albert Roger

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We explore how firms respond to downstream product shocks. We find that affected firms increase research and development and make additional safety-related upstream investments. These investments vary with firm capabilities and across shock severity. Competitors appear to vicariously learn and also engage in similar upstream investments in affected markets. We present evidence that these upstream investments have important performance implications. First, these investments are positively related to transition probabilities and approval rates for products that received them. Second, these upstream investments are related to a decrease in the intensity and rate of future downstream product shocks. Surprisingly, however, these upstream investments appear to have limited impact on mitigating the negative demand response caused by these shocks.  

Contact person: Marina Chugunova

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Large corporate labs play an important role in innovation. Recently, there has been a trend toward universities producing scientific research and then corporate labs developing this research into practical applications. This division of scientific research labor can have negative consequences for the development of general purpose technologies and other enabling technologies. These technologies rely on a positive feedback loop of innovation, from seeding to complementary trajectories and back, in order to generate substantial productivity gains for companies and for the economy overall. A push against the increasing division of scientific research labor may catalyze the feedback loop. We explore this possibility in the context of the development of quantum computers. After a change in companies’ incentives to engage in scientific research, following a surprise announcement about the near-term commercial potential of quantum computing, we document a rise in company academic publications and patents in quantum computing hardware. Soon after, we document a rise in academic publications and patents in the complementary software trajectory. We also find suggestive evidence of a feedback loop between the hardware and the software trajectories. We interpret these results to suggest complementarities between company and university scientific research in the context of a newly emerging enabling technology.

Contact person: Daehyun Kim

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This seminar delves into the scientific resilience and collaborative partnerships in the context of Ukraine’s post-war recovery. Dr. Oleksandra Antoniouk, Chairwoman of the Scientific Committee of the National Council of Ukraine for Science and Technology Development, will explore the effect of armed conflict on scientific endeavors and the innovative strategies employed during times of adversity. The discussion will extend to recovery initiatives, focusing on the pivotal role of European partnerships in rebuilding scientific infrastructure and fostering economic rejuvenation.

The talk will address the impact of the war on scientific research and the subsequent challenges the scientific community faces. Insights into the innovative solutions that emerged during the conflict and their contribution to addressing immediate challenges will be presented. Furthermore, during the seminar, the strategies and collaborative efforts employed to restore and strengthen Ukraine’s research capabilities post-war will be discussed, with a specific emphasis on the support and involvement of European partners.

Key topics include the transfer of technology, the adaptation of existing innovations, and the economic revitalization brought about by scientific and technological advancements. Dr. Antoniouk will analyze the role of policies and governance structures in facilitating recovery, highlighting legislative measures to foster collaboration with European counterparts. The discussion will extend to the human capital aspect, exploring strategies for attracting and retaining skilled researchers, as well as educational initiatives to nurture the next generation of scientific leaders. By focusing on the Ukrainian experience and its European partnership, the seminar will provide valuable insights into the multifaceted strategies required for post-war economic rejuvenation through science and innovation.

Contact person: Anatasiia Lutsenko

New business formation is a key driver of regional transformation and development. While we know that a region’s attractiveness for new businesses depends on its resources, infrastructure, and human capital, we know little about the role of local business networks in promoting or impeding the birth of new firms. We construct local business networks connecting more than 350 million nodes consisting of managers, owners and firms using administrative data on all German businesses from 2002 to 2020. Differentiating between serial and de-novo entrepreneurs, we show a positive but decreasing relation between a region’s connectedness and firm entry of serial entrepreneurs. Networks are, moreover, positively linked to firm survival. Relating our findings to a measure of ownership concentration, we show that networks provide additional explanations for regional variation in new business formations. These patterns are robust to synthetic instrumental variable estimations.

Contact person: Marina Chugunova

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We investigate the impact of short-term visits on scientific advancements by analyzing the staggered implementation of the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP) across 41 countries from 1988-2023. Our focus is on global collaborations involving US and non-US researchers benefiting from the VWP. Our results reveal a substantial influence on academic publications and conference proceedings, with no evidence of a substitution (crowd-out) effect. The number of publications by single authors or those exclusively affiliated with VWP countries did not experience a significant change. Further, we find a more pronounced effect in fields such as nursing, veterinary science, health professions, economics, and management, compared to relatively smaller effects observed in chemistry, physics, biochemistry, and mathematics. Notably, the impact on conference proceedings materializes more rapidly and with greater magnitude than on journal publications. Fields previously characterized by solo-author dominance exhibit a heightened effect. These findings underscore the crucial role of short-term face-to-face interactions between researchers from different countries and provide implications for academic seminars and conferences, visa and immigration policies, research and development (R\&D) strategies, and the future of work.

Contact person: Daehyun Kim

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Megaprojects, Digital Platforms, and Productivity: Evidence from the Human Brain Project
Presenter: Ann-Christin Kreyer (MPI) 
Discussant: Elisa Gerten (ISTO)

How to build institutions to facilitate large-scale, long-term life science projects? This paper studies the impact of the Human Brain Project (HBP), a 10-year (2013-2023) flagship project funded by the European Union, which offers a valuable setting for institutions that provide long-term infrastructure and grant support to neuroscience, computing, and brain-related medicine. We construct new data that track the individuals involved in the HBP, the timing of active engagement, and research output (e.g., publications). We exploit plausibly exogenous variation based on the phase-relevant resource allocation and individual engagement. We use current methods in the difference-in-difference (DiD) with two-way fixed effects, combined with natural language processing tools (esp. topic classification) to capture the evolution in research topics: fundamental neuroscience, neurotech, AI-robotics, and patient care. We find that the HBP has gained attraction over time, with more individuals actively participating from more geographically diverse bases, particularly junior faculties and graduate students. We find that participation in the HBP leads to increased individual productivity in publications per year, an expanded coauthor network, more citations, and a higher likelihood of publishing in a top neuroscience journal. All topic areas share the increased research productivity and impact, especially in the neurotech topic areas that combine neuroscience and CS/AI. These results are particularly driven by junior scholars (junior faculties and graduate students). The overall patterns are qualitatively similar for the subsample containing female scholars, despite smaller magnitudes and less precision. Scholars based in Germany, Italy, and Belgium demonstrated more pronounced increases in publications per author year for neuroscience and AI researchers. This paper has broad policy implications with new evidence that upstream digital collaborative institution design can help facilitate high-impact interdisciplinary neuroscience research, which is a critical input in discovering new and better treatments for brain diseases.

Suing Upstream or Downstream? A Value Chain Perspective on Defendant Selection in Patent Infringement Suits
Presenter: Adrian Goettfried (TUM)
Discussant: Elisabeth Hofmeister (MPI)

Patent infringement suits may target various parties in the value chain, from the original implementer who translated the patented invention into a technical artifact downward to a commercial user of the final product. We analyze the plaintiff’s selection of “litigation level”, i.e., the level in the value chain on which the defendant is active. We distinguish between “direct litigation”, where the defendant is the original implementer of the patent; and “indirect litigation”, where the defendant is downstream from the original implementer. Drawing on anchoring and transaction cost theory, we hypothesize which factors render bifurcated patent infringement suits more likely. We present empirical findings from a study of 247 patent infringement suits filed at US district courts between 2010 and 2016. 38% of the analyzed patent infringement suits are indirect, with a particularly high prevalence in retail trade (78%) and services (58%; e.g., software or computer services). Indirect suits are relatively rare in manufacturing industries (25%), with electronics being the only exception (51%). In multivariate analysis, we find indirect patent infringement suits to be associated with complex technologies, open standards covered by standard-essential patents, and product patents, supporting three of our hypotheses. We contribute theoretically to research on value capture by suggesting antecedents of direct and indirect patent infringement suits. We discuss policy implications arising from the relative efficiency of the two modes and identify the need for managers to take an end-to-end perspective on IP risks in the value chain.