The German Excellence Initiative is a path-breaking initiative to transforming the higher education system towards better performing universities and performance enhancing competition among them. Despite the reclassification of universities and other systemic changes brought about by this new funding format, it remains unclear whether and how the Excellence Initiative does have the intended impact on the performance of funded universities compared to non-funded universities. This paper examines the Initiative's effect on German universities' relative productivity in research and in teaching using a novel data set that integrates publication and detailed university-level data covering a 20-year period. A two-step method is employed: first, calculating relative productivity through a non-parametric approach, and second, estimating treatment effects using a difference-in-difference analysis. Our findings reveal that the Excellence Initiative impact on funded universities to improve their relative productivity is modest at best. In research, some Excellence-funded universities, particularly those that won Graduate Schools and Clusters of Excellence funding, improved significantly, although this effect is temporary. Winning the funding line Future Concepts does not (yet) result in a higher relative research productivity. In teaching, we found no significant average treatment effect, but a slightly significant time-specific decline in relative teaching productivity two years after funding.

This article analyzes the development of performance and structure in the German higher education sector, with a particular focus on policy measures to strengthen university autonomy (2009) and the Excellence Initiative (2006–2012). The analysis is based on data at the university level, covers the period 2000–2016, and uses a conditional, nonparametric approach to measure productivity as well as its dynamics using the Malmquist index. With regard to autonomy policy, we note that the decline in productivity growth in teaching observed since 2005, which even turned negative in 2012, could be related to the fact that autonomous universities were unable to match the growth in academic staff to the growth in graduate numbers. With regard to the Excellence Initiative and its goal of promoting research performance, we find significant differences between excellence-funded and non-excellence-funded universities. Research productivity follows a U-shaped pattern over time, with a recovery of productivity growth starting around 2010. Here, non-excellence-funded universities show stronger recovery and performance gains than excellence-funded universities, especially in quality-adjusted research. Overall, the Excellence Initiative promoted competition and structural change by enabling in particular non-excellence-funded universities to improve their performance even more.

The productivity gap between East and West Germany is a long ongoing discussion among the public and policy makers. Regional disparities still appear to be substantial. In this paper, we shed light on the role of allocative efficiency as a region's driver of productivity disparities. We show that over 50 percent of the East-West productivity gap is associated with a less efficient labor allocation in former East Germany. Controlling for the heterogeneity among German federal states, we perform spatial regression on official firm-level data (AFiD), revealing that the regional differences in allocative efficiency are significantly associated with trade openness, competitive intensity, economies of scale and labor mobility.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, political competition among the premiers of Germany’s 16 federal states intensified, with leaders striving to position themselves as proactive forerunners in managing the crisis. This paper examines the timing and determination of these state leaders in announcing, legislating, and enforcing COVID-19 policies, with attention to regional contexts and specific determinants influencing their actions. Utilizing multiple distinct databases, we conduct a survival analysis to assess each state’s political response in relative terms. Our findings reveal that state leaders who were early advocates in public announcements and discourse did not necessarily lead in formal legislation or enforcement of COVID-19 measures. This study provides a nuanced view of political competition in crisis governance, highlighting the divergence between political rhetoric and tangible policy action across Germany’s federal landscape.

This paper argues that the typical practice of performing growth decompositions based on log-transformed productivity values induces fallacious conclusions: using logs may lead to an inaccurate aggregate growth rate, an inaccurate description of the micro sources of aggregate growth, or both. We identify the mathematical sources of this log-induced fallacy in decomposition and analytically demonstrate the questionable reliability of log results. Using firm-level data from the French manufacturing sector during the 2009–2018 period, we empirically show that the magnitude of the log-induced distortions is substantial. We find that around 60–80% of four-digit industry results are prone to mismeasurement depending on the definition of accurate log measures. We further find significant correlations of this mismeasurement with commonly deployed industry characteristics, indicating, among other things, that less competitive industries are more prone to log distortions. Evidently, these correlations also affect the validity of studies investigating industry characteristics’ role in productivity growth.

Abstract The COVID pandemic caused the political competition between the prime ministers of the German states to reach its peak. Whoever is the best at announcing, launching, or implementing policies to combat the pandemic can hope to capitalize most politically. In this paper, we attempt to document which state leaders are forerunners or latecomers in this political competition, when going more into depth of a region's contextual factors. Based on several databases, we perform a survival analysis to compare state leaders' relative determination to implement COVID policies. As our results show, the forerunners in the political discourse are not necessarily forerunners in the implementation, nor in the enforcement of COVID policies. JEL Classification: D7 , H7 , H11 , H12 , R5

We study the productivity level distributions of manufacturing firms in France and Germany, and how these distributions evolved across the Great Recession. We show the presence of a systematic productivity advantage of German firms over French ones in the decade 2003-2013, but the gap has narrowed down after the Great Recession. Convergence is explained by the better growth performance of French firms in the post-recession period, especially of those located in the top percentiles of the productivity distribution. We also highlight the role of sectoral growth, firm size and export intensity in explaining the above convergence. In contrast, the contribution of allocative efficiency was small.

Since its inception, the European Emission Trading Systems (EU ETS) has been struggling with an oversupply of emission allowances and a highly volatile allowance price. A demand reducing technological progress accelerates the accumulation of excess allowances in the EU ETS, which is only partially taken into account in the system. We suggest a benchmark approach that endogenously adjusts the supply of allowances aligned to the technological progress. Using a non-parametric approach (Data Envelopment Analysis), we measure country specific technology shifts to proxy the required adjustment of the allowance supply in order to avoid a steady price decline and thus keep the incentive to invest in low-carbon technologies up. Our results indicate that the endogenous allowance reduction scheme, aligned to technological progress, would intensify the competitive pressure and facilitate a higher cap reduction factor than the existing linear reduction factor in the EU ETS.

In this paper, we analyze the extent to which low-income countries integrate into the global knowledge production network. We develop an (undirected) research collaboration model based on which we identify the drivers of global research collaboration using publication data of the field Business and Economics from the Web of Science and macroeconomic data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Institute for Statistics. Network and dynamic panel regression techniques are employed. Our results show that (i) reciprocal preferential attachment and the homophily between countries reinforce scientific collaboration, (ii) there is no evidence that low-income countries are becoming better integrated into the global knowledge production over the years, despite their active participation in international reserach collaboration, while (iii) high-income countries show a basic willingness to cooperate with them, which, in turn, promotes the integration of low-income countries, although this willingness seems to decline; and (iv) as to low-income countries, they have little choice but to invest more in education and R & D in order to advance in the global knowledge production network.

This chapter shows how the concept of rule-based behavior can be operationalized in evolutionary modeling. Instead of applying the maximization hypothesis, we resort to the concept of generic rule-based behavior, which is suitable to account for emergent phenomena. The Seceder model serves as a simple example of how the innovative process of knowledge creation can be understood as a path-dependent process. An analysis of patent data empirically complements the theoretical model.

Modern media technologies paved the way to the open access movement. Instead of the traditional academic subscription and publishing model, which allowed few big publishers to charge excessive publishing fees, the open access model raises the hope for a fair system, where scientific content is freely accessible and thus the dissemination of research work becomes possible at little cost. However, previous literature pointed out that big publishers seem to be able to preserve their market power when going from the subscription-based model to the open access model. In this paper, we take a closer look at the differences across disciplines. The publication routines in Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, Life Sciences and Health Sciences differ to a substantial extent. On these grounds, we test whether there are also differences in the explanations for the article processing charges (APC) across these disciplines. For doing so, we combined various data sources such as the dataset of the “Directory of Open Access”, the “OpenAPC Initiative” and the “CiteScore Metrics”. Our regression results show that the differences across the four fields in terms of publication habits and endowment levels allow publishers to exploit their market power to different extents.

We investigate the determinants of the sign of Research and Development reaction functions of rival firms. Using a two-stage n-firm Cournot competition game, we show that this sign depends on four types of environments in terms of product rivalry and technology spill-overs. We test the predictions of the model on the world's largest manufacturing corporations. Assuming that firms make R&D investments based on the R&D effort of the representative rival company, we develop a dynamic panel data model that accounts for the endogeneity of the decision of the rival firm. Empirical results thoroughly corroborate the validity of the theoretical model.

Large publishing companies have been dominating scientific publishing for long, which leads to high subscription fees and inhibited access to scientific knowledge. At digital era, the opportunity of an unrestricted access appears feasible, because the cost of publishing should be low. It is no longer the readers and libraries to pay subscription fees, but scientific organizations and authors themselves who pay for the cost of having their article published. As the data shows, there is a tremendous variance of article processing charges (APC) across journals, which obviously cannot be explained by the costs. One of the explanatory variables could be reputation, but it only contributes less than 5% to the variance in average APC. This study is meant to shed light on the various determinants of APC. Based on the data from the OpenAPC Initiative, the Directory of Open Access Journals and three different datasets of Web of Science, we employ ANOVAs and multivariate regressions. The results show that market power plays an important role to explain APC, inter alia, through market concentration, market position of individual publishers (publisher size), and the choice of hybrid publishing model.

Background In this paper, we try to shed light on the question whether natural disasters, such as nuclear accidents, have an impact on policy makers’ activity in passing new green energy policies. Disruptive moments like exogenous shocks reinforce society’s disapproval against polluting technologies and should open a window of opportunities to eventually initiate a change toward green energy. Methods Based on the data of 34 OECD countries, we disentangle the effect of disruptive exogenous shocks on countries’ policy activity. Starting with OLS regressions, we run several robustness checks by using a pre-sample mean approach, an ARDL technique called dynamic heterogeneous panel models (DHPM), which allows for the distinction between long- and short-run effects. Results The results corroborate the hypothesis that unexpected, disruptive events have a positive impact on the actual number of renewable energy policies. The fade-out time for shocks is about 7 years, leaving a positive long-term effect. Conclusion Exogenous events such as nuclear disasters act as “focusing event” and seem to offer policy makers a window of opportunities to initiate conducive policy measures toward a cleaner economy. Furthermore, a country’s capacity in green technologies is key to a pervasive diffusion of green technologies.

Interdisciplinary research has become increasingly popular in medical science. It offers a large potential for new perspectives, new inventions, and for researchers more opportunities to publish. Whether all researchers benefit equally from this opportunity when doing interdisciplinary research is unclear. Using data from a survey on German researchers in medical clinics and institutes, we investigate the determinants of research success measured by publication. We control for organizational differences and researchers’ experience level. Running negative binomial regressions, the results suggest that interdisciplinary research is beneficial for researchers on the executive level at institutes with little patient care. On lower hierarchical levels, interdisciplinary research contributes less to publication performance.

In this paper, we investigate the effect of carbon leakage correction when turning from a production-based to a consumption-based approach. We consider six different regulatory regimes. For calculating carbon leakage corrections, we employ the Leontief Inverse derived from WIOD input/output tables. To account for country-specific characteristics we use OECD data. As modelling technique, we apply a non-parametric productivity estimation approach (Data Envelopment Analysis) to calculate relative efficiency scores of countries' environmental performance to take their heterogeneity into account. The results suggest that irrespective of the chosen policy regime, the correction for carbon leakage will always lead to a significant reduction of emissions. The average effect of leakage correction amounts to 37% less CO2 emissions.