ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

We analyze the problem of matching asylum seekers to member states, incorporating wait times, preferences of asylum seekers, and the priorities, capacities, and burden-sharing commitments of member states. We identify a unique choice rule that addresses feasibility while balancing priorities and capacities. We examine the effects of both homogeneous and heterogeneous burden-sizes among asylum seekers on the matching process. Our main result shows that when all asylum seekers are treated as having identical burden-sizes, the asylum-seeker-proposing cumulative offer mechanism guarantees both stability and strategy-proofness. In contrast, when burden-sizes vary, there are scenarios where achieving stability or strategy-proofness is no longer possible.

Reverse engineering (RE) allows firms to learn about critical components and design features of competitors’ technologies. From an innovation strategy point of view, relying on RE involves a trade-off between acquiring others’ knowledge rather cheap and quickly, and being trapped into a follower strategy that rests on technology developments propelled by other firms. This paper aims to explore which type of firms use RE, and which type of innovation results from an RE-based knowledge acquisition strategy. Using data from the German part of the Community Innovation Survey (CIS), we find that RE is more often used by firms that operate under fierce price competition and have stronger financial constraints. RE using firms obtain higher product innovation output compared to firms with other knowledge acquisition strategies, though their innovations have a low degree of novelty (i.e., imitations). The market success of these innovations seem to rest on a price advantage, based on higher cost savings from process innovation.

As an example of supranational climate policy coordination for sectors not covered by carbon trading, the European Effort Sharing Decision set national targets for emission reductions for the time period 2013–2020. Member States were free to decide the national policies to implement to achieve these objectives. This is the first quantification of the impact this regulation had on the emissions of firms in the corresponding sectors. We exploit the differences along three variables: a national-level treatment intensity, an exposure index defined at the firm level and a time dimension (before or after the introduction of the policy). We find that, even in countries with no stringent target, emissions from exposed firms tended to decrease more than emissions from non-exposed firms. In addition, each percentage point increase in the stringency of the treatment leads to a 5.7% reduction in emissions for an average exposed firm. This provides interesting insights for other supranational climate agreements.

We assess intergenerational mobility in terms of education and income rank in five Latin American countries—Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and Panama—by accounting for the education and occupation of both parents. We find that intergenerational persistence estimates increase by 26% to 50% when parents’ occupations are considered alongside their education to proxy family socioeconomic background. The increase is particularly strong when education is more evenly distributed in the parents’ generation. Furthermore, we assess how the informativeness of each proxy for parental background evolves across countries and over time, and find that maternal characteristics have become increasingly informative in recent decades, in line with rising women’s educational attainment and labor force participation. We also observe interesting heterogeneities across countries and cohorts.

I examine the Facebook-Giphy merger which the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) blocked in 2022. The CMA’s decision marks the first time that an antitrust agency has blocked a big tech acquisition and suggests that at least some antitrust agencies are willing to take a tougher stance on mergers in the digital sector. The decision has a number of interesting features that I discuss in the paper.

The Flemish government launched its Spearhead Cluster (SHC) policy in 2017. The aim is to boost strategic sectors by setting up cluster initiatives which coordinate collaborative R&D initiatives. In this paper, we analyze whether becoming a member of such a cluster initiative has an impact on the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) of the firm. We exploit firm‐level data between 2013 and 2020 to estimate TFP and apply various difference‐in‐differences approaches to assess the programs' treatment effects. We find that becoming a member of a cluster has an average positive impact on firm‐level TFP of around 4% roughly, robust to different econometric specifications. A mechanism analysis suggests that the benefit of the cluster policy is driven by knowledge spillovers among the cluster members because we find that the positive treatment effect is negatively moderated by the distance among cluster members.

Background Understanding sex/gender in the context of health and disease is critical to deliver the best care. However, sex/gender have not been consistently considered in cardiovascular clinical trials. Global initiatives, including the Sex and Gender Equity in Research (SAGER)-guidelines, aim to improve the quality of the reporting, but it remains unclear if they are used consistently. Methods We conducted a systematic analysis of cardiovascular clinical trials published in PubMed between 2018 and 2024. To investigate the representation of women/females, we first analyzed the participation-prevalence-ratio (PPR). Second, we measured sex/gender-sensitive reporting (SGR) applying modified SAGER-guidelines. In addition, we determined whether study author sex/gender impacts the other variables. Findings We identified 1593 clinical trials with a total of 716,569 woman/female participants (38.5%). The median PPR of all trials remained suboptimal at 0.77 (95%-CI: 0.74–0.79) throughout the years with a modest positive trend towards 2024 and significant underrepresentation in some disease entities (e.g., ischemic heart disease, heart failure). Analyzing an evenly distributed sample of 632 trials, we found suboptimal SGR, especially for endpoints and discussions. We found a positive correlation of increased participation of women/females and SGR with women/females as authors. Interpretation Our results suggest an ongoing imbalance for the participation of women/females and suboptimal SGR in cardiovascular clinical trials, especially for certain diseases, with a modest positive trend. More women/females in the authorship team correlate with an increased PPR and are associated with an increase in SGR. Graphical Abstract

Increasing competition in science and higher education has sparked contentious debate and scholarly attention in recent years. Despite their significant merits, prevailing accounts of competition fall short of capturing the competitive dynamics in science and higher education: Most of the time, actors in this sector are involved in not just one but several competitions. Universities as organizations, researchers as individual actors, and also state actors are simultaneously embedded in different, nested, and interdependent competitions, which we refer to as multiple competition. Individual and collective actors engage in heterogeneous—albeit interrelated—forms of competition for scarce symbolic and material goods like attention, reputation, ranking positions, research grants, high-quality publications, personnel, and employment. Furthermore, the multiplicity of competitions that individual academics, universities, and state agencies face might reinforce each other. Using theoretical resources from sociology and economics, we propose a new conceptual framework for analyzing constellations of multiple competition in science and higher education. We demonstrate the added value of this conceptualization for empirical studies by drawing on examples from different academic systems.

While the importance of local characteristics for innovation activities has been studied extensively, it remains largely unknown to which extent better transport‐based accessibilities facilitate innovation. This study builds on data from a Germany‐wide agent‐based transport model to derive local accessibilities for different modes of transport and accounting for road congestion. We employ these accessibilities to investigate their role in explaining variation in local innovation activities. Besides geographical information on inventive activity drawn from patent application data, which is traditionally employed as an indicator of inventive outcomes, we use a novel innovation indicator based on company's website texts. The results suggest that there are more inventive and more innovation activities in regions with better accessibility. The results also show considerable heterogeneity in the role of accessibility for young versus established and small versus large companies, as well as for firms active in different sectors. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on the geography of innovation and the development of measures for non‐technological innovation.

Review systems, including quantitative measures as well as text-based expression of experiences, are omnipresent in today's digital platform economy. This paper studies the existence of reputation inflation, i.e., unjustified increases in ratings, with a special focus of heterogeneity between experienced and non-experienced users. Using data on more than 5 million reviews from an online wine platform we compare consistency between numerical feedback and textual reviews as well as sentiment measures. Overall the wine platform displays strongly increasing numerical feedback over our time period from 2014 to 2020 while the scores predicted by reviewers’ written feedback remain constant. This difference is consistent across both expert and non-expert reviewers. Online platforms as well as potential customers should be aware of the phenomenon of reputation inflation and simplifying feedback to one number might do a disservice to review platforms’ goal of providing a representative quality assessment.

Research Summary We investigate public support and venture capital (VC) investment in academic startups. Government support may enable follow‐on investment by providing a quality signal to investors. This signal is especially important for academic startups, which face large funding gaps due to their complexity, cutting‐edge nature, and uncertainty regarding the founders' management capabilities and commitment. Using a panel of startups in Germany, our analyses confirm that academic startups are more likely to obtain follow‐on VC investment after receiving public support than non‐academic startups. Further, this effect is limited in time, lasts longer for academic startups, is concentrated in high‐tech manufacturing firms, and is stronger for investments from business angels. Our findings have implications for policymakers seeking to foster academic entrepreneurship through policy programs and VC investment. Managerial Summary Obtaining seed and growth capital is essential for potentially highly innovative startups. We show that startups that obtain public support are more likely to receive VC funding and that this effect is stronger for startups with academic founders, approximately twice as large. We further show that this benefit is limited in time, concentrated in the high‐tech manufacturing industry, and more salient for business angel financing than for investment by independent VC funds or corporate VCs. For founders of academic startups, our results imply that acquiring public support might enhance the chances of attracting follow‐on financing.

The concept of Open Innovation (OI) has breathed new life into both empirical research and industry practice concerned with distributed and collaborative modes of innovating. While much of the empirical literature has emphasised the innovation enhancing benefits, our study extends existing work that has recorded the limits to open innovation. Using a sample of Belgian firms, we document that open innovation leads to higher rates of project abandonment and to lower rates of project completion; the latter suggesting the presence of delays and interruptions. Among other robustness tests, we address the concern that openness could be endogenous with regard to project abandonment. As we also find that higher abandonment rates coincide with lower future firm performance, we conclude that open innovation may have negative effects on firms’ innovation outcomes because of higher rates of project failures and hold-ups.

Zusammenfassung Die Industriepolitik rückt zunehmend in den Fokus der deutschen und der europäischen Wirtschaftspolitik. In diesem Beitrag entwickeln Hanna Hottenrott, Roman Inderst, Eckhard Janeba, Klaus Schmidt, Achim Wambach und Christine Zulehner eine Systematik industriepolitischer Eingriffe und zeigen, dass industriepolitische Maßnahmen zur Förderung von Innovation, Klimaschutz, Versorgungssicherheit oder Verteidigungsbereitschaft begründet sein können. Gleichzeitig sind die Gefahren der Industriepolitik wie Wettbewerbsverzerrungen, Subventionswettläufen und Staatsversagen ernst zu nehmen. Das Autorenteam plädiert daher für eine wettbewerbskonforme Industriepolitik, die auf europäischer Ebene koordiniert wird, marktkonform ausgestaltet ist und sich auf klar begrenzte Ziele wie die Stärkung von Resilienz und Sicherheit sowie die Anpassung an den Strukturwandel konzentriert. Der Beitrag ist eine gekürzte Fassung des Gutachtens des Wissenschaftlichen Beirats beim Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie unter demselben Titel, veröffentlicht am 26. August 2025.

Evaluating whether research aligns with the global burden of disease is essential for equitable and effective scientific progress and improvement of human health. Without systematic evaluation of this alignment, science cannot respond to shifting health needs. Here we analyzed the distribution between research and disease, linking 8.6 million disease-specific publications to two decades of global disease burden data using a triangulated large language model approach. We find that since 1999, research and disease burden have seemingly become much more aligned; however, this is mainly because of regional declines in communicable disease burden, whereas the noncommunicable disease burden has increased and globalized. Meanwhile, research effort has not changed to match changes in disease burden. Our simulations suggest that without intentional alignment, the research–disease divergence will probably widen by a third over the next two decades, and be substantially accelerated by the reduction of US public funding for international research. Aligning research with health needs will require strategic investments, improved global coordination, open science policies and stronger, more equitable international partnerships to build resilience in a fragile research ecosystem.

New business formation is a key driver of regional transformation and development. While we know that a region's attractiveness for new businesses depends on its resources, infrastructure, and human capital, we know little about the role of local business networks in promoting or impeding the birth of new firms. We construct local business networks connecting more than 350 million nodes consisting of managers, owners, and firms using data on the universe of German businesses. Differentiating between firms founded by serial and de novo entrepreneurs and different network measures (average degree and transitivity of the largest component), we show that the connectedness between actors within a region matters for firm entry and individual firm performance. We show a positive relationship between a region's connectedness and firm entry by serial entrepreneurs. Networks are also linked to individual firm performance, especially in terms of larger entry size of de‐novo firms and higher employment growth for both de‐novo and serial entrepreneurship.

The Community Innovation Survey (CIS) is an important data source for studying innovation in enterprises and for producing innovation statistics for the enterprise sector. Introduced in 1992 as a joint initiative of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Statistical Office of the European Commission, and a group of innovation researchers, CIS data significantly contributed to a better understanding of the drivers and results of innovation activities in enterprises. Today, the CIS is a mandatory survey in all European Union member states, and is used as a model for innovation surveys in many other countries, including the USA, China, Japan, and South Korea. In the chapter the conceptual foundations of the CIS are presented, as well as the content and the methodology of the survey. The potential of CIS data for various areas of innovation research is also demonstrated, but the criticism brought forward in terms of limited international comparability is also acknowledged. In the final part, the main challenges of the CIS are discussed, as well as how the survey may be further developed in order to better serve research needs. This includes more and better measures of innovation output, taking up new innovation concepts such as radical or disruptive innovation, and more quantitative data on innovation processes in enterprises.

The IAB/ZEW Start-Up Panel is a longitudinal and representative survey established in 2008, designed to focus on founders and their businesses during the very early stages of the firm life cycle. Data on newly founded companies, their founders, business activities, and innovation and market strategies is scarce, posing challenges for both research and evidence-based policymaking. The IAB/ZEW Start-Up Panel’s objective is to provide reliable research data on new businesses in Germany for the research community. This paper outlines the panel’s design, methods, and structure. We also discuss potential research topics, usage, and access to the data for academic purposes.