Brown Bag Seminar
Brown Bag Seminar Financial Markets Department In der Seminarreihe "Brown Bag Seminar" stellten Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter der Abteilung Finanzmärkte und deren…
Zur Seite
Import Competition and Firm Productivity: Evidence from German Manufacturing
Richard Bräuer, Matthias Mertens, Viktor Slavtchev
World Economy,
Nr. 8,
2023
Abstract
Abstract We study how different types of import competition affect firm productivity using firm-product data from German manufacturing (2000-2014). Competition from high-income countries causes affected domestic firms to increase their productivity and lower their prices. Oppositely, import competition from low-wage countries does not lead to firm productivity gains. Instead, domestic firms' sales and input usage decline. Our findings confirm the intuition of ladder models that the effect of competition depends on the "closeness" of competitors. They are in line with widespread X-inefficiencies throughout the economy, which firms reduce in response to competition from high-income countries.
Artikel Lesen
People
People Job Market Candidates Doctoral Students PhD Representatives Alumni Supervisors Lecturers Coordinators Job Market Candidates Tommaso Bighelli Job market paper: "The…
Zur Seite
Department Profiles
Research Profiles of the IWH Departments All doctoral students are allocated to one of the four research departments (Financial Markets – Laws, Regulations and Factor Markets –…
Zur Seite
Competition and Moral Behavior: A Meta-Analysis of Forty-Five Crowd-Sourced Experimental Designs
Anna Dreber, Felix Holzmeister, Sabrina Jeworrek, Magnus Johannesson, Joschka Waibel, Utz Weitzel, et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS),
Nr. 23,
2023
Abstract
Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.
Artikel Lesen
Long-run Competitive Spillovers of the Credit Crunch
William McShane
IWH Discussion Papers,
Nr. 10,
2023
Abstract
Competition in the U.S. appears to have declined. One contributing factor may have been heterogeneity in the availability of credit during the financial crisis. I examine the impact of product market peer credit constraints on long-run competitive outcomes and behavior among non-financial firms. I use measures of lender exposure to the financial crisis to create a plausibly exogenous instrument for product market credit availability. I find that credit constraints of product market peers positively predict growth in sales, market share, profitability, and markups. This is consistent with the notion that firms gained at the expense of their credit constrained peers. The relationship is robust to accounting for other sources of inter-firm spillovers, namely credit access of technology network and supply chain peers. Further, I find evidence of strategic investment, i.e. the idea that firms increase investment in response to peer credit constraints to commit to deter entry mobility. This behavior may explain why temporary heterogeneity in the availability of credit appears to have resulted in a persistent redistribution of output across firms.
Artikel Lesen
European Firm Concentration and Aggregate Productivity
Tommaso Bighelli, Filippo di Mauro, Marc Melitz, Matthias Mertens
Journal of the European Economic Association,
Nr. 2,
2023
Abstract
This paper derives a European Herfindahl–Hirschman concentration index from 15 micro-aggregated country datasets. In the last decade, European concentration rose due to a reallocation of economic activity toward large and concentrated industries. Over the same period, productivity gains from an increasing allocative efficiency of the European market accounted for 50% of European productivity growth while markups stayed constant. Using country-industry variation, we show that changes in concentration are positively associated with changes in productivity and allocative efficiency. This holds across most sectors and countries and supports the notion that rising concentration in Europe reflects a more efficient market environment rather than weak competition and rising market power.
Artikel Lesen
Sources of Large Firms’ Market Power and Why It Matters
Filippo di Mauro, Matthias Mertens, Bernardo Mottironi
VOXEU COLUMN,
January
2023
Abstract
Excessive market power has detrimental effects on the functioning of the economy, raising consumer prices, distorting the allocation of resources, and creating welfare losses. The existing literature has largely focussed on competition in product markets. This column argues that it is important to differentiate between various sources of firm market power on output and input (most notably labour) markets. European firm-level data reveals that large firms charge lower markups in product markets but exert their market power significantly in labour markets. Competition authorities can and must distinguish between the sources of market power when attempting to regulate it.
Artikel Lesen
The Cleansing Effect of Banking Crises
Reint E. Gropp, Steven Ongena, Jörg Rocholl, Vahid Saadi
Economic Inquiry,
Nr. 3,
2022
Abstract
We assess the cleansing effects of the 2008–2009 financial crisis. U.S. regions with higher levels of supervisory forbearance on distressed banks see less restructuring in the real sector: fewer establishments, firms, and jobs are lost when more distressed banks remain in business. In these regions, the banking sector has been less healthy for several years after the crisis. Regions with less forbearance experience higher productivity growth after the crisis with more firm entries, job creation, and employment, wages, patents, and output growth. Forbearance is greater for state-chartered banks and in regions with weaker banking competition and more independent banks.
Artikel Lesen
The Urban Wage Premium in Imperfect Labor Markets
Boris Hirsch, Elke J. Jahn, Alan Manning, Michael Oberfichtner
Journal of Human Resources,
April
2022
Abstract
Using administrative data for West Germany, this paper investigates whether part of the urban wage premium stems from greater competition in denser labor markets. We show that employers possess less wage-setting power in denser markets. We further document that an important part of the observed urban wage premia can be explained by greater competition in denser labor markets.
Artikel Lesen
