VWL, insb. Industrieökonomik

Diese kleine Arbeit liefert einen vollständigen Überblick über die Möglichkeiten, ökonomische Methoden zur Analyse militärischer Fragen einzusetzen. Entwickelt wird eine Taxonomie von Ansätzen, wobei jeder Ansatz durch ein holzschnittartiges Beispielmodell illustriert wird. Dieses kann als Grundlage für die Gestaltung einer Teildisziplin Militärökonomik verstanden werden.

We investigate if four leading, electronic news gathering organizations in the US - ABC News, CBS News, FOX News, and NBC News - fulfill their role as the fourth estate in the US democracy. Our analysis, using the Political Coverage Index (PCI) introduced by Dewenter et al (2020), is based on the tonality of their political coverage using 815,000 human-coded news items from 2001 through 2012. For our econometric analysis, we use panel regressions with media and time fixed effects. To account for endogeneity, we cut time spans around national elections out of our data. In the remaining data, elections can be seen as a purely exogenous event. Focusing on the entire media set, we find robust empirical results for an anti-government bias in media reporting: Under Republican presidents, political coverage tends to be more liberal, whereas it tends to be more conservative if the president is a Democrat. However, when focusing on each single news organization, interesting differences emerge: For CBS News and NBC News, we find robust empirical evidence of anti-government-bias. In contrast, FOX News is always much more critical of Democrats than of Republicans. Hence, FOX News can be seen as a more loyal servant to one party rather than acting as the fourth estate. In addition, we find no evidence that ABC News significantly changes its position depending on the presidency. Although descriptive statistics show a certain tendency toward government-critical reporting by ABC News, the variation is not statistically significant.

In this paper, we analyse the final decisions for merger cases prepared by the European Commission (EC) since 1990 and build a unique subsample for all non-cleared cases. These incorporate all merger notifications which were either withdrawn by the notifying parties or have been prohibited by the European Commission.We find a sudden decline in prohibitions and withdrawals of cases since 2002 and explore three judicial defeats of the European Commission as determining factors behind these developments. We also find a higher likelihood of withdrawal or prohibition if cases are registered in sectors which incorporate firms in the business of information and communication or transportation and storage. When classifying the documents with a supervised machine learning algorithm, we are able to automatically identify the cleared versus the non-cleared cases with over 90% accuracy. Finally, we find that network effects, high market shares and the risk of collusion are the main competitive concerns which contribute to prohibition decisions in the information and communications sector.

Market delineation is a fundamental tool in modern antitrust analysis. However, the definition of relevant markets can be very difficult in practice. This preliminary draft applies a new methodology combining a simple price correlation test with hierarchical clustering -a method known from machine learning- in order to analyze the competitive situation in the German retail gasoline market. Our analysis reveals two remarkable results: At first, there is a uniform pattern across stations of the same brand regarding their maximum daily prices which confirms the claim that prices are partly set centrally. But more importantly, price reactions are also influenced by regional or local market conditions as the price setting of gasoline stations is strongly affected by commuter routes.