By means of an event study of stock market reactions to the announcement of the Olympic Games host cities, we find a significant and positive announcement effect of hosting the Summer Games, with a cumulative abnormal return of about 2% within a few days. We do not find any significant results...

We survey the literature on the link of labour market related outcomes to individ-ual physical activity and sports participation. The first part of the survey is devoted to the individual participation decision and is based on papers from various disciplines. The sec-ond part summarises parts of...

This article analyzes how the perceived effectiveness of intellectual property protection and competitive pressure affect firms' innovation strategy choices, concretely, whether to abstain from innovation, to introduce products that are known in the market but new to the firm (imitation) or to...

We use consumer panel data to calculate the damage suffered by German consumers due to a detergent cartel that was active between 2002 and 2005 in eight European countries. Applying before-and-after and difference-in-differences estimations we find average overcharges between 6.7 and 6.9 percent...

We investigate the effect of market structure on market performance in the market for consumer electronics. This research is novel, because we exploit product life cycle information to build an instrumental variable for the number of firms in a market, a variable which hitherto had to be treated...

This paper examines cartel overcharges for the European market. Using a sample of 191 overcharge estimates and several parametric and semi-parametric estimation procedures, the impact of different cartel characteristics and the market environment on the magnitude of overcharges is analyzed. The...

This article explores the propensity to patent in the light of the disclosure effect. Unlike earlier approaches concerned with the patenting decision, we take into account that a disclosure effect may decrease the merits of patenting by facilitating inventing around the patent for competitors....

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical investigation of the two basic effects of patenting: the positive effect of temporarily mitigating competition, and the negative effect of mandatory disclosure of a patent application. Providing empirical evidence for the presented theoretical...

In German electricity submarkets for residential customers standard contracts offered by former monopolists are the more costly option for customers who have not switched to an alternative contract yet. As most German households are served with this contract type we follow the Limit Pricing...

We study a differentiated product market in which an investor initially owns a controlling stake in one of two competing firms and may acquire a non-controlling or a controlling stake in a competitor, either directly using her own assets, or indirectly via the controlled firm. While industry...