Embedded Files
PhD candidate in economics, University of Mannheim and ZEW
Welcome
Welcome
I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Mannheim, and I work at the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW). I am affiliated with the Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation (MaCCI). My research interests are empirical industrial organization and applied Microeconomics.
Contact
Contact
ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research
L 7, 1
68161 Mannheim , Germany
Email: robert.aue@gess.uni-mannheim.de or find me on LinkedIn
Curriculum Vitae: cv (English) or cv (German)
Research
Research
Spatial effects of price regulation and competition. A structural approach to the German retail pharmacy market. (pdf)
Spatial effects of price regulation and competition. A structural approach to the German retail pharmacy market. (pdf)
This paper examines the effect of price competition on the location choices of retail pharmacies in large cities. I exploit a regulatory change in 2004 that introduced price competition for non-prescription drugs to estimate the parameters of a dynamic spatial entry model, using a comprehensive panel dataset of retail pharmacy locations. The dynamic model is estimated by means of a nested fixed point approach, because the asymmetric nature of the entry game renders conventional two-step estimators inapplicable. The computational burden of this approach is alleviated by tailoring the concept of oblivious equilibrium, developed by Weintraub et al. (2008), to the spatial nature of the game. I find that the regulatory change lead to more intense local competition and lower entry costs. The estimated structural model is then used to decompose the effects of the regulatory change on market structure and consumers' travel distances. I find that one third of the total decline in the number of pharmacies between 2004 and 2016 is attributable to increased local interaction, whereas it caused the consumers' distance to the nearest pharmacy to increase only marginally. This suggests that price competition is beneficial for consumers not only because it lowers retail prices, but also because it leads to a more efficient spatial distribution of retail pharmacies.
What Happens when Separate and Unequal School Districts Merge?
What Happens when Separate and Unequal School Districts Merge?
joint with Thilo Klein and Josue Ortega
We study the welfare effects of school district consolidation, i.e. the integration of disjoint school districts into a centralized clearinghouse. We show theoretically that district consolidation may unambiguously reduce students' welfare, even if the student-optimal stable matching is consistently chosen. However, we show that there are expected welfare gains from district consolidation for all students, in particular for those who belong to smaller and over-demanded districts. Using data from the Hungarian secondary school assignment mechanism, we compute the actual welfare gains from district consolidation and compare these to our theoretical predictions. Our results suggest large welfare gains from district consolidation for students, equivalent to attending a school eight kilometres closer to the students' home address. As an important building block of our empirical strategy, we describe a method to consistently estimate students' preferences across schools, and vice versa. (work in progress)
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse