Webinar: Yassine Lefouili TSE

Please join us for a webinar on Tuesday the 11th of May 2021 at 13:00 Athens time. The speaker is Yassine Lefouili, Toulouse School of Economics. The title of the talk is "Mergers and Demand-Enhancing Innovation". The paper can be found at: https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/wp/2018/wp_tse_907.pdf

This webinar is free and open to all. The moderator is Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos. To join us follow this link: https://hello.freeconference.com/conf/call/3011249

Abstract: We study the impact of horizontal mergers on merging firms' incentives to invest in demand-enhancing innovation. In our baseline model, we identify four effects of a symmetric merger on these incentives: the innovation diversion effect, the margin expansion effect, the demand expansion effect, and the per unit return to innovation effect. We offer sufficient conditions for a merger to reduce or raise merging firms' incentives to innovate in the absence of spillovers and efficiency gains in R&D, and find that a comparison between the innovation diversion and price diversion ratios is informative about the impact of a merger on innovation.