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

CESifo Working Paper No. 8646

Coverage: Ökonomenstimme (in German)

Patents on General Purpose Technologies: Evidence from the Diffusion of the Transistor 

(with Monika Schnitzer and Martin Watzinger)

How do patents influence the spread of General Purpose Technologies (GPT)? To answer this question, we analyze the diffusion of the transistor, one of the most important technologies of our time. After AT&T began licensing the transistor on standardized terms in 1952, the diffusion of the transistor technology and especially cross-technology spillovers increased dramatically. This suggests that patents on GPTs may hinder the positive feedback loop between innovation in upstream and in application sectors, the primary reason why GPTs produce unusually large productivity improvements. Standardized licensing increased innovation and market entry in particular by unrelated inventors in unconcentrated markets..

R&R at Journal of Industrial Economics

CEPR Discussion Paper No. 15713

Coverage: VoxEU