Prof. Florian Ederer Receives ESEM Best Paper Award
Ederer and his co-author were honored for a study finding that the rise of common ownership, in which large institutional investors have overlapping investments in competing companies, has decreased the efficiency of the economy and the value provided to consumers.
Florian Ederer, associate professor of economics, has won the ESEM Award 2022 for his paper “A Tale of Two Networks: Common Ownership and Product Market Rivalry,” together with his co-author, Bruno Pellegrino of the University of Maryland.
The award was presented at EEA-ESEM 2022, the annual congress of the European Economic Association and Econometric Society European Meeting, in August.
The study finds that the rise of common ownership, in which large institutional investors have overlapping investments in competing companies, has decreased the efficiency of the economy and the value provided to consumers.
In its awards notification to Ederer, ESEM wrote, “We are confident that this paper will be a highly influential and important contribution. Your paper brings together insights from several literatures—empirical and theoretical finance, macroeconomics and industrial organization—and applies novel estimation techniques to shed light into an important and policy-relevant question, namely the degree to which common ownership could be dampening market competition and contributing to deadweight losses and to unequal surplus redistribution in the overall economy.”
Ederer’s research is in the areas of organizational economics, innovation, antitrust, and behavioral economics. It focuses on the incentive design in organizations, how it shapes innovation, and how it is in turn affected by social interactions and more realistic assumptions about the motives of principals and agents.