Florian Anselm Münch

Exporting offers high private and public returns, yet in most countries, only a few large, male-managed firms engage in exporting. We incentivize small, female-managed firms to form a consortium, a corporate group, to test whether they can collectively overcome the fixed export costs. We randomize 176 firms into four sectoral consortia or a control group and study the consortium’s effect on firm performance. After two years, treated firms are 16pp (+63%) more likely to export and doubled their sales. The results are driven by consortia members expanding and using their business networks more, gaining entrepreneurial confidence, and improving management practices. Yet, cooperation is also costly. Only half of the invited firms ultimately join the consortium and conflicts arise during cooperation, suggesting careful selection and conflict resolution mechanisms would improve the intervention. Incentivizing horizontal integration of small firms offers a cost-effective, scalable way to share investment costs for export or technology adoption, with the potential to foster broader economic development.

Governments spend over a billion US dollars annually on firm support programs, yet application rates are low and outcomes modest. Attracting enough and the right firms may alter the program’s effect and statistical power to detect it. Yet, we document that most firm program evaluations don’t report recruitment strategies. We conduct two email experiments involving 5000 SMEs while recruiting for two export support programs in Tunisia, tracking each communication channel’s contribution to registrations. In experiment 1, we find goal-specific messages targeting firms‘ supply or demand side constraints attract fewer but better-performing firms. In experiment 2, we find an influencer video emphasizing program benefits attracts better-performing female-led firms, while reducing participation costs via free childcare attracts less-performing firms managed by younger female entrepreneurs with children. Finally, we show open communication channels attract more underrepresented firms. In general, the findings suggest recruitment strategies substantially impact sample size and composition.

To examine the different roles of regulation and standards in the age of globalisation, we hypothesize and investigate the relation of regulation and national and international standards on the one hand with innovation input (R&D expenditure) and innovation output (patents) on the other hand. The analysis is based on data of 26 high-income countries between 1998 and 2018. There are two main results. Firstly, international standards outperform both de-regulation and national standardisation as they are positively associated with R&D expenditure and patenting. On the other hand, national standards – once believed a source of competitiveness – are negatively related to patents and hence seem to localize economies and slow-down innovation. Secondly, de-regulation does not correlate positively with R&D expenditure, but with increased patenting. We argue the former suggest businesses did not – as assumed – spend freed up resources on R&D, but instead strategically used patenting to replace lost regulation-based protection with patent fences. This casts doubts on the added social value of de-regulation induced innovation.

Rather than by an invisible hand, many industries are kick-started by a government policy. Despite little robust evidence, local content requirements are increasingly used to incentivize domestic manufacturing if imports are cheaper. To examine the effect of local content, we explore an unintended quasi-policy-experiment. Starting in 2013, the Indian government simultaneously held solar auctions with and without local content, providing an otherwise unobserved counterfactual. We digitize the results from the 41 auctions worth 8.65 billion $ in solar module demand and collect annual revenue and solar patents of the 113 participating firms between 2004–2020. For causal identification, we compare winners of local content with similar open auction winners in a staggered difference-in-difference estimation. While we observe an insignificant increase in the same and the following year after firms win LCR auctions, overall, we find winning local content auctions does not significantly increase firms’ solar patents or sales. We identify three reasons why the policy did not create stronger, lasting effects. First, local content did not create sufficient production to enable learning by doing. Second, local content did not generate enough revenue for re-investment into R&D. Third, local content reduced competition in auctions. The analysis underlines the predicament countries face as open auction winners, despite having won 9 times as much capacity, do not patent much (more).

Solar technology diffuses across the globe as countries transition from fossil to renewable energy. Little solar-specific experience and capacity in newly adopting countries can result in technical failures and lower solar plant performance. This contributes to making the investment in solar plants in newcomer countries risky and may undermine political targets of solar energy deployment. One solution suggested by international organizations is for policymakers in adopting countries to include international quality standards as technical requirements in public auctions. Here, we develop a conceptual framework on how international quality standards could help build a solar sector. As a case study, we analyze the explanatory factors of technical requirements in 100 public auctions of utility-scale solar photovoltaic plants carried out in India between 2013 and 2019. Our findings suggest that more international quality standards are required in auctions in which the government rather than a private actor ultimately carries the commercial risk. On the other hand, local content requirements and attracting foreign investors do not correlate with technical requirements. We argue that using minimal quality standards is unlikely to promote local technological catch-up or attract long-term foreign investments but transfers the techno-commercial risk from the government to the private sector.