Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · 18h

Do incumbents buy startups to scale innovation or to stifle it?

New research covering 60 countries finds that acquired startups were highly innovative before their acquisition, but their patenting drops sharply afterward, while acquirers' innovation doesn't rise.

www.oecd.org/en/publicati...

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Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · 18h

Private credit has exploded. But why?

It's not just replacing banks. It's also private equity's new frontier:

BDCs now blend debt and equity, offer PE-like returns with less risk, and cater to a growing base of retail investors.
melaniewallskog.github.io/files/robins...

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Reposted by Florian Ederer

Jennifer Doleac @jenniferdoleac.bsky.social · 20h

I’ve decided not to post my annual “women on the Econ job market” thread this year. Social media has splintered too much, and now that I’ve left academia I’m focused on other priorities.

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Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · 1d

Kandinsky in the far right is a good guess.

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Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · 1d

Richly deserved prize for Aghion ...

... but I am equally interested in the paintings and the designer chair in the background.

Top and bottom left look like late Cubist (Bracque, Gris, Picasso). Far right looks like a Miro. No idea about the chair.

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Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · 1d

Dating your boss comes with risks and rewards.

New research from Finland shows subordinatesä earnings rise 6% after starting a relationship with their manager but fall 18% after a breakup.

Unsurprisingly, it also hurts team morale and retention.
www.nber.org/papers/w34346

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Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · 1d

Why do people support tariffs even when they make everyone poorer?

It's not just economics, it's jealousy of trade. People prefer protectionism when it feels like a win over others, even if it raises their own prices.

www.nber.org/papers/w34351

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Reposted by Florian Ederer

Cristina Caffarra @cristinacaffarra.bsky.social · 1d

Rich discussion of AI #acquihires (when are they a problem, what shld antitrust do?) turned into broader debate on “do we have a competition problem w Al & what is it?”

Fireside w J Kanter, fab panel @florianederer.bsky.social @igorletina.bsky.social @lugaricano.bsky.social I Marinescu, H Zenger 1/

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Reposted by Florian Ederer

Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham @paulgp.com · 6d

Posted a short blog post with updated data (and public repo with data) of current state of Econ job market:

paulgp.com/2025/10/08/j...

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Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · 11d

Research output after tenure drops off a cliff for business, economics, sociology, and other non-lab fields.

But it remains high post-tenure in lab-based fields such as chemistry, physics, computer science, and engineering.
www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

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Reposted by Florian Ederer

Centre for Economic Policy Research @cepr.org · 13d

Change of format! Join us for a fireside w/ Jonathan Kanter moderated by @cristinacaffarra.bsky.social followed by an open panel discussion w/ @lugaricano.bsky.social @imarinescu.bsky.social @igorletina.bsky.social & Hans Zenger moderated by @florianederer.bsky.social.
#EconSky

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Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · 11d

When NBA rookies land on stacked teams, they get less playing time, less visibility, and lower long-term earnings.

Early exposure matters for careers.

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Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · 13d

Today’s firearm ownership in the US is partly rooted in frontier history.

Counties with longer exposure to the frontier from 1790 to 1890 have higher gun ownership today and respond more strongly to demand shocks.

arosenbe.github.io/assets/paper...

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Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · 13d

U.S. regions more exposed to AI saw faster emissions growth, more reliance on fossil fuels, and dirtier electricity generation.
cepr.org/publications...

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Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · 15d

No, there are two of them: Ole Peters and Eric Weinstein

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Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · 15d

Never has multihoming seemed less appealing.

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Reposted by Florian Ederer

Tim Bresnahan @timobres.bsky.social · 20d

Super interesting paper. Colluders often switch or hide language to avoid detection. Will invitations to collude change language to avoid this specific detection? Many other classes of bad actors, e.g. posters of harmful content on social media, have so changed to avoid AI detection.

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Reposted by Florian Ederer

Centre for Economic Policy Research @cepr.org · 20d

AI Acquihires: Competition Risks, Talent Battles and Economic Spillovers Webinar - 8 October @ 17:00 CEST

🗣️Jonathan Kanter @lugaricano.bsky.social @imarinescu.bsky.social @igorletina.bsky.social Hans Zenger

Moderator: @florianederer.bsky.social
Register: cepr.org/events/ai-ac...
#EconSky

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Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · 20d

Collusion doesn't just happen in smoke-filled rooms. It can be out in the open in earnings calls.

New research uses NLP on 300k+ transcripts to spot the language that firms use to coordinate publicly. Regulators can use this tool to detect anticompetitive behavior.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

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Reposted by Florian Ederer

Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 24d

Restricting visas doesn’t lead to hiring non-immigrants—it leads to hiring foreigners. For every H-1B visa rejection, multinationals add ~0.4–0.9 foreign employees, especially in R&D hubs like India, China, and Canada.

via @florianederer.bsky.social

How Do Restrictions on High-Skilled
Immigration Affect Offshoring?
Evidence from the H-1B Program
Britta Glennon
WORKING PAPER 27538
DOI 10.3386/w27538
ISSUE DATE July 2020
REVISION DATE February
2023
Highly-skilled workers are not only a crucial and relatively scarce inputs into firms' productive and innovative processes, but are also a critical resource determining competitive advantage. An increasingly high proportion of these workers in the US were born abroad and permitted to work on skilled worker visas. How do multinational firms respond when artificial constraints, namely policies restricting skilled immigration, are placed on their ability to hire scarce human capital? This paper combines visa microdata and comprehensive data on US multinational firm activity to demonstrate that firms respond to restrictions on H-1B immigration by increasing foreign affiliate employment at the intensive and extensive margins, particularly in China, India, and Canada. The most impacted jobs were R&D-intensive ones, but there is some evidence that non-R&D employment was also affected. The paper highlights a means by which firms can circumvent constraining policies and mitigate country-level risk, but it also suggests that, for the average MNC, this means is imperfect; for every visa rejection, they hire 0.4 employees abroad. The most globalized MNCs are the most likely to respond to these restrictions by offshoring, highlighting that firm capabilities—in the form of prior internationalization-shape the decision and ability to offshore in response to skilled immigration restrictions; indeed, these firms hire 0.9 employees abroad for every visa rejection. More broadly, the paper provides evidence of a push factor for internationalizing knowledge activity: artificial constraints on resources result in firms circumventing restrictive policies in ways that may not be anticipated by policy makers.

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Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · 20d

Excited to moderate this panel on "AI Acquihires: Competition Risks, Talent Battles and Economic Spillovers" with the antitrust all-star team of Kanter, Garicano, Marinescu, Letina, and Zenger.

Wednesday, 8 October 2025
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM (ET)

Registration:
cepr-org.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: AI Acquihires: Competition Risks, Talent Battles, and Economic Spillovers. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webina...

Antitrust agencies are increasingly confronted with “acquihires” of AI start-ups — yet most cases so far have been waved through under the banner of “uncertainty.” A decade ago, similar caution around...

cepr-org.zoom.us

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Reposted by Florian Ederer

Aaron Sojourner @aaronsojourner.org · 28d

Common Ownership & Employee Earnings
updated & improved

Consider a pair of companies that sell into the same product market. If pair shares common owners, the owners have incentive for pair to soften competition.

Same with local labor market competition
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Common Ownership and Employee Earnings *
José Azar Xin Dai Yue Qiu Aaron Sojourner
September 15, 2025
Abstract
Using administrative data in the manufacturing sector from the U.S. Census Bureau, this paper provides the first evidence on the effect of common ownership on
employee earnings. Using firms’ additions to the S&P 500 index as a shock to their
local competitors’ common ownership, we find that, after a same-industry competitor enters the S&P 500 index, the average employee earnings of S&P 500 incumbents
in the same local labor market decrease. Additionally, these firms’ employment increases. These findings are inconsistent with the canonical oligopsony models but our generalized model of oligopsony incorporating a recruitment intensity margin can rationalize them

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Reposted by Florian Ederer

chloe gibbs @chloergibbs.bsky.social · 28d

The AEA released the committee's report on the 2023 climate survey and it's chock full of depressing stuff, but I couldn't help but notice this pull quote.

Posted here without further commentary. 👀

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Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · Sep 3

www.nber.org/papers/w33976

State of the Art: Economic Development Through the Lens of Paintings

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

www.nber.org

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Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · Sep 3

We usually rely on GDP, trade, or wages to study the past. This amazing paper flips the script.

It analyzes 630,000 paintings (1400-2000) to extract emotions and shows how art tracks living standards, wars, inequality, and even climate shocks.

(How is this economics? Everything is economics!)

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