Ownership of publicly listed German companies has undergone significant changes in recent years. The aim of this report is to document these trends since 2007 and analyze the extent to which firms that compete in the same product market are owned by the same investors, which is known as common ownership. We show that some large foreign institutional investors have overtaken domestic investors and now ...
In this study, we analyze a client’s choice of contract in auctions where Dutch law firms compete for cases. The distinguishing feature is that lawyers may submit bids with any fee arrangement they wish. We find robust evidence that bids offering hourly rates are less attractive to clients. Our findings tentatively contradict lawyers’ often-made argument that hourly rates are in a client’s best in ...
Energy sectors—primarily power generation and gas production, but also energy transmission and distribution—require significant capital investment in infrastructure. Market structures as well as the degree of competition and regulation are key factors that determine firms’ incentive to invest. Yet the empirical research on the link between these factors and private investment is still quite scarce, ...
Die Bereitstellung eines sicheren und wirksamen Impfstoffs gegen Covid-19 ist von zentraler Bedeutung für die Aufhebung der Eindämmungsmaßnahmen im öffentlichen Leben. Um den Zugang zu Impfstoffen zu sichern, schließen Regierungen mit Impfstoffunternehmen spezielle Verträge, "Advance Purchase Agreements" (APA), ab. Diese Studie vergleicht die Beschaffungsstrategien der USA und der EU. Es kann festgestellt ...
The deployment of a safe and effective vaccine for Covid-19 will be central to lifting containment measures. In a bid to speed up vaccine deployment, governments are entering into ‘Advance Purchase Agreements’ (APAs) with vaccine companies to secure access to vaccine doses. We document and compare the vaccine procurement strategies of the US and the EU. Most notably, we find that both the US and the ...
We provide an evaluation of the impact of public subsidy schemes that aimed to support the development of basic broadband infrastructure in rural areas of Germany. Such subsidies are subject to state aid control by the European Commission (EC). While the EC increasingly recognises the role of economic analysis in controlling public aid to companies, there are to date no full retrospective studies performed ...
We investigate patterns in common ownership networks between firms that are active in the US pharmaceutical industry for the period 2004-2014. Our main findings are that “brand firms” — i.e. firms that have R&D capabilities and launch new drugs — exhibit relatively dense common ownership networks with each other that further increase significantly in density over time, whereas the network of “generic ...
We investigate the dimensions through which R&D spillovers are propagated across firms via cooperation through Research Joint Ventures (RJVs). We build on the framework developed by Bloom et al. (2013) which considers the opposing effects of technology spillovers and product market rivalry, and extend it to account for RJVs. Our main findings are that the adverse effects of product market rivalry are ...