Benedikt Herz

European Commission | ec · Internal Market and Industry (GROW)

The design right is a widely used but poorly understood intellectual property right that allows the protection of products’ aesthetics and outer appearances. We study the influence of design protection on price by exploiting cross-country differences in the scope of protection in the European automotive spare parts market: In some countries, repair...

The design right is a widely used but poorly understood intellectual property right that allows the protection of products' aesthetics and outer appearances. We study the influence of design protection on price by exploiting cross-country differences in the scope of protection in the European automotive spare parts market: In some countries, repair...

In this paper, we document border effects in the award of public contracts in the European single market. We use a dataset of 1.8 million contract awards, which we match to geolocations to estimate a gravity model of procurement flows between European NUTS3 region pairs. We find very sizable cross-national border effects for all types of goods and...

This paper provides new insights on the relationship between structural change and the fertility transition. We exploit the spread of an agricultural pest in the American South in the 1890s as plausibly exogenous variation in agricultural production to establish a causal link between earnings opportunities in agriculture and fertility. Households s...

We investigate unemployment due to mismatch in the United States over the past three and a half decades. We propose an accounting framework that allows us to estimate the contribution of each of the frictions that generated labor market mismatch. Barriers to job mobility account for the largest part of mismatch unemployment, with a smaller role for...

We study the impact of the European Union Trademark (EUTM), the first pan-European intellectual property right (IPR) title established in 1996. The EUTM drastically reduced the cost of trademark protection, particularly for firms active in many EU member states. As a consequence, the number of marks and the resources spent on protection increased s...

A displaced worker might rationally prefer to wait through a long spell of unemployment instead of seeking employment at a lower wage in a job he is not trained for. I evaluate this trade-off using micro-data on displaced workers. To achieve identification, I exploit that the more a worker invested in occupation-specific human capital, the more cos...

This paper presents estimates of lost movie sales due to unpaid movie consumption. We are the first to provide estimates that are representative of the internet-using population and cover multiple countries. Based on an online questionnaire with almost 30,000 respondents, we document that one unpaid (first) viewing of a movie displaces about 0.37 u...

We document border effects in the award of public contracts in the European Single Market. Cross-national border effects are very sizable, even after controlling for currency, cultural differences, and other variables: "local" bidders are over 900 times more likely to be awarded a contract than "foreign" bidders. More surprisingly, we find substant...

This paper provides new insights on the link between structural change and the fertility transition. In the early 1890s agricultural production in the American South was severely impaired by the spread of an agricultural pest, the boll weevil. We use this plausibly exogenous variation in agricultural production to establish a causal link between ch...

In the early 1890s, cotton fields in the American South were ravaged by the boll weevil. Using a model that controls for differences in the intensity of cotton production at the county level, we show how the boll weevil significantly changed southern agricultural labor arrangements and labor market outcomes. The boll weevil significantly reduced th...

Over the last 20 years there has been a surge in national trademark applications in Europe. This increase in filings has been interpreted as a sign of increased innovative performance. In this paper, we argue that the explanation is much simpler. First, using a novel dataset, we document that trademark filing fees have been steadily decreasing and...

Despite its simplicity, the Nagel-Schreckenberg (NaSch) traffic cellular automaton is able to reproduce empirically observed traffic phenomena such as spontaneous traffic jam formation. Most traffic cellular automata models achieve collision-free driving by explicitly allowing for unlimited braking capabilities. However, it is rather natural to vie...

We present a very simple stochastic traffic cellular automaton (CA) model to reproduce synchronized traffic. This model aims to be nearly as simple as the well-known Nagel–Schreckenberg model, but to overcome to shortcomings of the latter: The Nagel–Schreckenberg model (NaSch) and its variants achieve collision-free driving by explicitly allowing f...