Can Peer Mentoring Improve Online Teaching Effectiveness? An RCT During the COVID-19 Pandemic

(with David Hardt and Johannes Rincke)

Online delivery of higher education has taken center stage but is fraught with issues of student self-organization. We conducted an RCT to study the effects of remote peer mentoring at a German university that switched to online teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Mentors and mentees met one-on-one online and discussed topics like self-organization and study techniques. We find positive impacts on motivation, studying behavior, and exam registrations. The intervention did not shift earned credits on average, but we demonstrate strong positive effects on the most able students. In contrast to prior research, effects were more pronounced for male students.

AEARCTR-0005868, CESifo Working Paper No. 8671

Current draft 

Coverage: Press Release (German), Bayerischer Rundfunk (in German), The Education Exchange, Ökonomenstimme (in German)

ICT, Collaboration, and Science-Based Innovation: Evidence from BITNET

(with Kathrin Wernsdorf and Martin Watzinger)

Does access to information and communication technologies (ICT) increase innovation? We examine this question by exploiting the staggered adoption of BITNET across U.S. universities in the 1980s. BITNET, an early version of the Internet, enabled e-mail-based knowledge exchange and collaboration among academics. After the adoption of BITNET, university-connected inventors increase patenting substantially. The effects are driven by collaborative patents by new inventor teams. The patents induced by ICT are exclusively science-related and stem from fields where knowledge can be codified easily. In contrast, we neither find an effect on patents not building on science nor on inventors unconnected to universities.

Short-listed for EPIP Young Scholar Award 2020

R&R at Journal of Public Economics

CESifo Working Paper No. 8646

Coverage: Ökonomenstimme (in German)

Fostering the Diffusion of General Purpose Technologies: Evidence from the Licensing of the Transistor Patents

(with Monika Schnitzer and Martin Watzinger)

How does proactive licensing influence the spread of a General Purpose Technology? To answer this question, we analyze the diffusion of the transistor, one of the most important technologies of our time. We show that the transistor diffusion and cross-technology spillovers increased dramatically after AT&T began licensing its transistor patents along with symposia to educate follow-on inventors in 1952. Both these symposia and the licensing of the patents itself played important roles in the diffusion.
A subsequent reduction in royalties did not lead to further increases, suggesting that proactive licensing in itself was more important than the specific royalty rates.

Resubmitted to the Journal of Industrial Economics

CEPR Discussion Paper No. 15713

Coverage: VoxEU