Events

Moderation: Daria Kim

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Room 313 

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 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.

Contact Person: Laura Rosendahl Huber, Ph.D.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 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.

Note: This seminar will be of interdisciplinary character and follow a novel format – following a 30min introductory presentation by Jörg and Paco, we will focus on the economic aspects of the project during the discussion.

Contact: Zhaoxin Pu

Moderation: Dr. Natale Rampazzo

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 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.

Contact Person: Zhaoxin Pu

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 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.

Contact Person: Zhaoxin Pu

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Room E10

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 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.

 
Contact Person: Dr. Marco Kleine

Moderation: Luc Desaunettes

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 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.

 
Contact Person: Dr. Fabian Gaessler