Contributions in Merlin

In this paper we examine the quantitative effects of margin regulation on volatility in asset markets. We consider a general equilibrium infinite-horizon economy with heterogeneous agents and collateral constraints. There are two assets in the economy which can be used as collateral for short-term loans. For the first asset the margin requirement is exogenously regulated while the margin requirement for the second asset is determined endogenously. In our calibrated economy, the presence of collateral constraints leads to strong excess volatility. Thus, a regulation of margin requirements may have stabilizing effects. However, in line with the empirical evidence on margin regulation in U.S. stock markets, we show that changes in the regulation of one class of assets may have only small effects on these assets' return volatility if investors have access to another (unregulated) class of collateralizable assets to take up leverage. In contrast, a countercyclical margin regulation of all asset classes in the economy has a very strong dampening effect on asset return volatility.

This study analyses the impact and effectiveness of targeted public support for R&D investment at the firm level. We test whether the policy design aiming at incentivizing (international) collaboration and R&D in SMEs achieves input as well as output additionality. Our results show that the targeted public subsidies trigger R&D spending, especially so in internationally collaborating SMEs. We further evaluate the different impact of privately financed and publicly-induced R&D investment on innovation performance. The results confirm that the publicly-induced R&D is productive as it translates into marketable product innovations. While both types of R&D investments trigger significant output effects, the effect of policy-induced R&D investment on sales from market novelties is highest for international collaborators as well as for SMEs.

In this paper we consider European and national funding for corporate innovation projects as heterogeneous treatments and analyze their effect on innovation input and output at the firm level. In terms of innovation input, we do not find evidence that one policy crowds out the effect of the other. Instead the policies are complements. In terms of output, we find that subsidy recipients are more active with respect to patenting. A citation analysis of patents reveals that the subsidy recipients file patents that are more valuable (in terms of forward citations) than those filed in the counterfactual situation of receiving no public support. These results suggest that public funding actually triggers socially beneficial research projects and that the co-existence of national and European policies does not lead to crowding-out effects when compared to a hypothetical world of a closed economy with no supplemental European policies.

Innovations are rarely generated in complete isolation. Due to inherent uncertainty, high knowledge requirements, and high financial investments, many firms search for external partners to develop new products and processes. However, there is an ongoing debate as to whether firms who cooperate with diverse external partners such as suppliers, customers and governmental research institutions see increased innovation performance as compared to firms who cooperate with a less diverse range of collaborators. This paper investigates how diversity in cooperation networks affects firms' innovation performance output as measured by sales share of innovative products. To address this question, the authors analyze a large-scale sample of microdata from Swiss firms from four waves (1999, 2002, 2005, and 2008) of the Swiss innovation survey using panel data analysis. The findings suggest that firms with greater diversity in their cooperation network benefit by generating new product innovations, and that small firms benefit more from diversity of collaborators as compared to other firm sizes. The study further detects a curvilinear relationship between diversity of collaborator types and innovation performance, and emphasizes the importance of appropriate HRM and knowledge management policies and practices to provide firms with an effective mechanism for maximizing benefits from a diversified cooperation network.

We present a flexible and scalable method to compute global solutions of high-dimensional non-smooth dynamic models. Within a time-iteration setup, we interpolate policy functions using an adaptive sparse grid algorithm with piecewise multi-linear (hierarchical) basis functions. As the dimensionality increases, sparse grids grow considerably slower than standard tensor product grids. In addition, the grid scheme we use is automatically refined locally and can thus capture steep gradients or even non-differentiabilities. To further increase the maximal problem size we can handle, our implementation is fully hybrid parallel, i.e. using a combination of MPI and OpenMP. This parallelization enables us to efficiently use modern high-performance computing architectures. Our time iteration algorithm scales up nicely to more than one thousand parallel processes. To demonstrate the performance of our method, we apply it to high-dimensional international real business cycle models with capital adjustment costs and irreversible investment.

Companies face competitive advantages or disadvantages depending on a country’s national institutional setting. The question is whether and how companies with highly similar product markets and technologies are able to stay competitive if they are located in disadvantaged national institutional settings. Building on the Varieties of Capitalism approach, we analyze the effect of different national institutional settings on one important characteristic of a company’s organizational structure, the span of control of production supervisors. Through plant interviews, we generated a unique dataset of matched-pair engineering companies in Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the U.S. The findings indicate that the span of control is an important mechanism of adjustment to national institutional settings. Production supervisors in companies producing in coherently coordinated market economy like Germany have on average a broader span of control than those in coherently liberal market economy like the U.S. However, in mixed institutional settings like Switzerland and the UK, we find companies with a broad and companies with a narrow span of control, thus indicating that companies have the strategic power to adjust with their own company-level institutions to either complementing or substituting national institutions.