Topic Industry

Let's Switch to the Cloud: Cloud Adaption and Its Effect on IT Investment and Productivity

The advent of cloud computing promises to improve the way firms utilize IT solutions. Firms are expected to replace large and inflexible fixed-cost investments in IT with more targeted variable spending in cloud solutions. In addition, cloud usage is expected to increase the productivity of firms, as it allows them to quickly customize the IT they require to their specific needs. We assess these assertions ...

Emergency-Aid for Self-employed in the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Flash in the Pan?

The self-employed faced strong income losses during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many governments introduced programs to financially support the self-employed during the pandemic, including Germany. The German Ministry for Economic Affairs announced a €50bn emergency-aid program in March 2020, offering one-off lump-sum payments of up to €15,000 to those facing substantial revenue declines. By reassuring ...

German Financial State Aid during COVID-19 Pandemic: Higher Impact among Digitalized Self-Employed

In response to strong revenue and income losses that a large share of the self-employed faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the German federal government introduced a €50bn emergency aid program. Based on real-time online-survey data comprising more than 20,000 observations, we analyze the impact of this program on the subjective survival probability. In particular, we investigate how the digitalization ...

Cost and Productivity Effects of Demographic Changes on Local Water Service

We investigate the impact of demographic changes on local public services taking the case of water service. We apply a structural production function approach to a large panel of German water utilities between 2003 and 2014. Exploring variation of population density and the population age structure across service areas and over time, we provide evidence that demographics and their changes significantly ...

A Lasting Crisis Affects R&D Decisions of Smaller Firms: The Greek Experience

We use the prolonged Greek crisis as a case study to understand how a lasting economic shock affects the innovation strategies of firms in economies with moderate innovation activities. Adopting the 3-stage CDM model, we explore the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity for different size groups of Greek manufacturing firms during the prolonged crisis. At the first stage, we find that the ...

BCCP Online Panel 2021

The tremendous growth of digital transactions – mainly through online platforms - is profoundly affecting the way we interact and opening vast opportunities to improve our lives. Consumers are benefiting from an unprecedented proliferation of new services and products that previously were too costly to be developed and marketed to customers. At the same time, the characteristics of platform...

Competitors’ Reactions to Big Tech Acquisitions: Evidence from Mobile Apps

Since 2010, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) have acquired more than 400 companies. Competition authorities did not scrutinize most of these transactions and blocked none. This raised concerns that GAFAM acquisitions target potential competitors yet fly under the radar of current merger control due to the features of the digital economy. We empirically study the competitive effects ...

Setting Priorities, Pooling Resources and Accelerating Transformation: New Approaches in Industrial and Technology Policy

Merger Policy in Digital Markets: An Ex-Post Assessment

This paper presents a broad retrospective evaluation of mergers and merger decisions in markets dominated by multisided digital platforms. First, we document almost 300 acquisitions carried out by three major tech companies—Amazon, Facebook, and Google—between 2008 and 2018. We cluster target companies on their area of economic activity providing suggestive evidence on the strategies behind these mergers. ...

Common Ownership in the U.S. Pharmaceutical Industry: A Network Analysis

We investigate patterns in common ownership networks between firms that are active in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry for the period 2004–2014. Our main findings are that “brand firms”—that is, firms that have research and development capabilities and launch new drugs—exhibit relatively dense common ownership networks with each other that further increase significantly in density over time, whereas ...