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I am a professor of Economics at the University of Münster and an affiliate of the CEPR and the CESifo Research Network.
I am also a director at the Münster Center for Economic Policy and professor at the REACH-EUREGIO Startup Center. 
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Work in progress
The Breakup of Bell and its Impact on Innovation
(with Monika Schnitzer)
This paper analyzes the effects of the 1984 breakup of the Bell System, the largest telecommunications company at the time, on the rate and direction of innovation in the U.S. The aim of the breakup was to end exclusionary practices that Bell allegedly used against competitors. After the breakup, patenting by U.S. inventors increased by 19%. This increase was concentrated in telecommunications technologies and was driven by existing companies. We also find that the diversity of innovation, in terms of different approaches to the same technology, increased. Our results suggest that exclusionary behavior can lead to "missing innovations".
ICT, Collaboration, and Science-Based Innovation: Evidence from BITNET
CESifo Working Paper No. 8646 | Short-listed for EPIP Young Scholar Award 2020
R&R at Journal of Public Economics
R&R at Journal of Public Economics
Does access to information and communication technologies (ICT) increase innovation? We examine this question by exploiting the staggered adoption of BITNET across U.S. universities in the 1980s. BITNET, an early version of the Internet, enabled e-mail-based knowledge exchange and collaboration among academics. After the adoption of BITNET, university-connected inventors increase patenting substantially. The effects are driven by collaborative patents by new inventor teams. The patents induced by ICT are exclusively science-related and stem from fields where knowledge can be codified easily. In contrast, we neither find an effect on patents not building on science nor on inventors unconnected to universities
Standing on the shoulders of science
(with Monika Schnitzer and Josh L. Krieger)
HBS working paper | CEPR Discussion Paper | Patent novelty data
Coverage: Matt Clancy's New Things under the sun | VoxEu | Harvard Working Knowledge
R&R in Strategic Management Journal
Coverage: Matt Clancy's New Things under the sun | VoxEu | Harvard Working Knowledge
R&R in Strategic Management Journal
Today's innovations rely on scientific discoveries of the past, yet only some corporate R&D builds directly on scientific output. We analyze U.S. patents to establish three new facts about the relationship between science and the value of inventions. First, we show that patents which build directly on science are on average 26% more valuable than patents in the same technology that are disconnected from science. Patents closer to science are also more likely to be in the tails of the value distribution (i.e., greater risk and greater reward). Based on patent text analysis, we next show that patent novelty predicts their value. Finally, we find that science-intensive patents are more novel. Overall, using science appears to help firms capture more value through relatively novel inventions.
