Contributions published at Entrepreneurship (Ulrich Kaiser)

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In this paper we evaluate the heterogeneous effects of online copyright enforcement. We ask whether the unexpected shutdown of the popular file hosting platform Megaupload had a differential effect on box office revenues of wide-release vs. niche movies. Identification comes from a comparison of movies that were available on Megaupload to those that were not. We show that only movies that premiere in a relatively large number of theaters benefitted from the shutdown of Megaupload. The average effect, however, is negative. We provide suggestive evidence that this result is driven by information externalities. The idea is that online piracy acts as a mechanism to spread information about product characteristics across consumers with different valuations for the product. Our results question the effectiveness of blanket public anti-piracy policy, not only from a consumer perspective, but also from a producer perspective.

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We study the effects of a Danish wage subsidy program for highly educated workers on the performance of the persons and firms participating in the program. Using data on the population of program participants, both workers and firms, we find that the program had positive effects on employment and annual earnings during program participation while there are no positive effects for the years after program expiration. At the employer-level, we find statistically significant effects on the number of highly educated employees for both the period of program participation and the subsequent time period. For the total number of employees we only find positive effects during program participation while there are no statistically significant effects for value added, net income, return on assets, wages per employee and labor productivity.

It is difficult to test the prediction that future career prospects create implicit effort incentives because researchers cannot randomly “assign” career prospects to economic agents. To overcome this challenge, we use data from professional soccer, where employees of the same club face different external career opportunities de- pending on their nationality. We test whether the career prospect of being selected to a Euro Cup national team affects players’ pre-Cup performances, using nationals of countries that did not participate in the Euro Cup as a control group. We find that the Euro Cup career prospect has positive effects on the performances of play- ers with intermediate chances of being selected to their national team, but negative effects on the performances of players whose selection is very probable. Our findings have implications for the incentive effects of within-firm promotions and of external career opportunities.

We empirically address value appropriation hazards when firms enter into external relationships in search for innovation. Using firm-level data from Germany we document a positive link between R&D outsourcing and intellectual property infringement. In line with theory we show that this effect varies with the market value of knowledge, and the allocation of property rights. We discuss how outsourcing induced spillovers may foster technology diffusion, affecting industry evolution and market structure.

We study the total effect of the mobility of R&D workers on the firm that they join and the firm that they leave.•We document not only positive effects of R&D workers joining from other firms (in particular from those firms that are patent-active) but also of workers who have left the firm to join a patent-active new employer.•We hence find evidence for positive effects of mobility on innovation and, in particular, for labor mobility increasing the total innovative activity of the firms involved in the mobility event.•The interpretation of our findings as resulting from knowledge transfer is backed up by analysis of citations patterns between firms showing that the probability that firm A cites firm B (and vice versa) increases if there have been labor flows between these firms.•We thereby provide micro-level evidence for labor mobility stimulating the overall innovative activity of countries or regions through knowledge spillovers. We investigate the effect of mobility of R&D workers on the total patenting activity of their employers. Our study documents how mobile workers affect the patenting activity of the firm they join and the firm they leave. The effect of labor mobility is strongest if workers join from patent-active firms. We also find evidence of a positive feedback effect on the former employer's patenting from workers who have left for another patent-active firm. Summing up the effects of joining and leaving workers, we show that labor mobility increases the total innovative activity of the new and the old employer. Our study which is based on the population of R&D active Danish firms observed between 1999 and 2004 thus provides firm-level support for the notion that labor mobility stimulates overall innovation of a country or region due to knowledge transfer.

We study how startup teams are assembled in terms of team member human capital characteristics. To this end, we derive a statistically motivated benchmark for new venture team heterogeneity in terms of observed team member characteristics to generate stylized facts about team member diversity at startup and how it evolves as the new venture matures. We use the population of Danish startups that were established in 1998 and track them until 2001. Main findings are that teams are relatively more homogeneous at startup compared to our benchmark, indicating that difficulties associated with workforce heterogeneity (like affective conflict or coordination cost) as well as “homophily” (people’s inclination to bound with others with similar characteristics) may overweigh the benefits of heterogeneity. While workforce heterogeneity does increase over time, the increase is smaller compared to our benchmark but substantially larger than if team additions and replacements had the same characteristics as the initial team members.