Topic Industry

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. ...

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

Support study for the revision of the EU guidelines on state aid for environmental protection and energy (EEAG)

The European Commission (DG Competition) commissioned an international consortium of DIW Berlin together with E.CA Economics, LEAR, University of East Anglia and Sheppard Mullin with a background study on State aid in the field of environmental protection and energy. The results of the study will support the Commission in the revision of the EU Guidelines on State aid for environmental protection...

US and EU secure vaccine production on home soil

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...

DG Competition of the European Commission publishes several studies evaluating State aid rules provided by a consortium with the participation of the DIW Berlin

On 2 June 2020 DG Competition of the European Commission published several support studies on the retrospective evaluation of State aid rules. This “Fitness check” will serve as a basis for future Commission’s decisions about whether to further prolong or update the rules expiring in 2020. The consortium of DIW Berlin, Lear, Sheppard Mullin and UEA Consulting under the leadership ...

The CoRisk-Index: A data-mining approach to identify industry-specific risk assessments related to COVID-19 in real-time

This event takes place online via Zoom. Abstract:  While the coronavirus spreads around the world, governments are attempting to reduce contagion rates at the expense of negative economic effects. Market expectations have plummeted, foreshadowing the risk of a global economic crisis and mass unemployment. Governments provide huge financial aid programmes to mitigate the expected economic...

Market Concentration in Europe: Evidence based on Antitrust Markets (cancelled)

Abstract:  An increasing body of empirical evidence has documented trends to risen concentration, profits, markups, and market power in many industries across the world since the 1980s. Several factors – such as globalisation, digitisation, the increased role of intangible assets and sunk costs, as well as M&A activity and the (under)enforcement of merger control– have been...

Learning from Data and Network Effects: The Example of Internet Search

The rise of dominant firms in data driven industries is often credited to their alleged data advantage. Empirical evidence lending support to this conjecture is surprisingly scarce. In this paper we document that data as an input into machine learning tasks display features that support the claim of data being a source of market power. We study how data on keywords improve the search result quality ...

Gross Employment Effects in the Renewable Energy Industry in Germany: An Input–Output Analysis from 2000 to 2018

The purpose of this paper is to provide detailed insights into an approach to measure gross employment of the renewable energy (RES) industry in Germany in order to improve transparency and comparability. The method applied for the assessment of gross employment figures follows the input–output (IO) modeling approach and covers direct as well as indirect employment effects.All-in-all, four different ...

Emergency Aid for Self-Employed in the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Flash in the Pan?

The self-employed are among those facing the highest probability of strong income losses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments in many countries introduced support programs to support the self-employed, including the German federal government, which approved a €50bn emergency aid program at the end of March 2020 offering one-off lump-sum payments of up to €15,000 to those facing substantial revenue ...