Ownership of real estate through corporations in offshore tax havens creates opportunities for tax evasion and money laundering and may have undesirable effects in housing markets. In this paper, we study offshore ownership of real estate in the United Kingdom by combining several data sources: administrative data from the land register, a comprehensive transaction database, a propriety database on corporate ownership links, and a handful of offshore data leaks. Our descriptive analysis shows that the market share of offshore corporations has increased over time and varies strongly across market segments: It currently stands at 1.25% in the overall residential market and around 15% for top-end properties. When data leaks allow us to trace ownership through offshore corporations to the beneficial owners, we find that around half have ties to Africa, Asia and the Middle East, but that the largest ‘foreign’ investor is the United Kingdom itself. Turning to causal evidence, we show that changes in tax incentives and ownership transparency induce strong responses in patterns of offshore ownership, suggesting that both taxation and secrecy are important motives for the beneficial owners. Finally, we show that the Brexit referendum was followed by a sharp increase in property sales by offshore owners and a large differential decrease in property prices in local areas with more offshore ownership, conditional on area and property characteristics. This suggests that the reduction in demand from offshore investors triggered by Brexit had a negative causal effect on property prices and, more broadly, that offshore ownership can have significant real effects in housing markets.

The French private equity ecosystem is characterised by the presence of a public investment bank, Bpifrance, which has structured and streamlined the sector since its creation in 2013. Analysing a dataset of 668 startups, each pursuing at least one UN Sustainable Development Goal and having received funding between 2008 and 2023, we identify the financing dynamics and key influencers within this ecosystem, with a particular focus on Bpifrance. Secondly, we question the influence of Bpifrance, as a direct public investor in venture capital, on the length of time between funding rounds and the ability of funded ventures to progress along the financial escalator. To this end, an event history analysis is conducted on a sample of 1,721 French ventures that raised their first seed funds between January 2000 and January 2019.

We modify the setting by Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) such that subjects can choose their opponent in the tournament stage based on information about past performance. There is no monetary (dis)incentive to choose a particularly (weak) strong opponent, but they can receive non-rank-order evaluations regarding their own competition behavior and the level of strength of the chosen opponent. We observe that subjects increase their performance when knowing that they get such feedback. Some choose an opponent with an above median performance and then achieve a significantly higher performance themselves. We also find evidence that this treatment effect can be explained by a gender-specific reaction to the appraisal scheme. Men show a performance increase, which is more than three times higher as compared to women. This finding is particularly striking given that monetary incentives remain the same. Thus, men’s aptitude for a stronger competition seems to be triggered by the evaluation scheme. In addition to that, we observe that around 30 (13) percent of all men (women) select opponents who are even stronger than themselves. We interpret this as men’s tendency to ‘over compete’. From the perspective of a firm, such a behavior is detrimental. In fact, women have a significantly higher chance of winning the actual tournament. In sum, our results urge caution when using evaluation schemes

Using a text-mining approach applied to task descriptions of occupations together with worker-level administrative data, we explore the growth in the greenness of employment in Germany between 2012 and 2022. We first demonstrate that the general greening of occupations (“within-effect”) accounts for half of the overall greening of employment, whereas shifting occupational employment shares (“between-effect”) account for the other half. Second, we show which occupations contribute most to the within-effect. Third, we provide evidence which worker flows are mainly responsible for the between-effect, and which socio-demographic groups drive these labour-market transitions.

This paper provides novel evidence on the relationship between corporate taxation and firm productivity measured by total factor productivity (TFP). Existing theoretical literature suggests several channels through which taxes can affect firm productivity. Nevertheless, empirical evidence is scarce. We investigate the relationship between corporate taxation and firm productivity - overall and across the distribution of firm productivity. We also analyze how different tax system characteristics affect the development of a firm's productivity over time. Our findings suggest that a higher tax burden may drive the least productive firms out of the market and may decrease the probability of a firm moving up the productivity distribution over time.

This paper examines internal migration from a lifetime perspective using unique data on detailed residential biographies of individuals born in Germany between 1944 and 1986. We first describe life-cycle patterns of internal mobility and potential differences across space, time, and socio-demographic groups. We find substantial differences across the life course, with major location changes around important educational decisions and striking differences across groups, especially by educational attainment. We then investigate causality in the substantial education-mobility gradient. For identification, we exploit two policy-induced sources of variation, each shifting towards better education at a different margin of the ability distribution. Using a difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity design, we find no effect of these policies on internal mobility.

Inventory control and vehicle routing are two classic themes in the Operations Research literature. On the interface, a field called inventory routing has emerged that considers jointly the inventory control at geographically scattered customers and the distribution of products towards these customers. This has ample of applications – from vendor managed inventory in retail environments towards aftersales spare parts management. A typical practical constraint in many settings is that solutions to the inventory routing problem should be cyclic, meaning that at fixed moments in time replenishments are made. Recently, Sontag et al. (2023) introduced a new chance-constrained model and an exact branch-and-price-and-cut algorithm for this problem, and Hasturk et al. (2024) extended this model to deal with supply uncertainty, specifically focusing on hydrogen distribution. I will discuss the main innovations of both works, and discuss the latest research results (with Menglei Jia, Ahmadreza Marandi, Feng Sheng) when adopting a distributionally robust optimization paradigm.

In a hospital, all departments are connected, and every logistical decision can impact others. Efficient and high-quality service requires the necessary resources such as personnel and beds to be dimensioned correctly and to be available in the right place at the right time. Typically, resource-related planning problems are treated separately for each resource without integrated planning across several resources, leading to sub-optimal solutions. Optimisation approaches can support decision making in healthcare practice, reduce the workload for clinical staff and decision makers and improve different objectives including efficiency, staff or patient satisfaction, quality of care or costs. Due to the complexity, it is not possible though to build mathematical optimisation models that address all aspects simultaneously. In addition, some decisions must be made onsite and in real-time. Simulation models can help with online decision making as well as analysing the potential consequences when transferring solutions from mathematical models into practice. With the support of the Julius von Haast Fellowship from the Royal Society of New Zealand, we aim to design an integrated simulation framework to model a complete hospital allowing to investigate all interdependencies and improvement potentials and to analyse the benefit of integrated planning. A hospital-wide simulation model is a first step towards a digital twin of a hospital. While different forms of digital twins exist in the literature, we focus on those of healthcare facilities, services or processes that have operations research and mainly simulation models in their core, using a (constant) flow of real-time data, support decision making in real-time and offer the possibility to analyse the effects of decisions and potential scenarios. Despite the growing numbers of publications and review papers on the topic, the extent to which working digital twins have been developed and tested or even integrated in healthcare practice is still unclear. Therefore, we have performed a structured literature review and conclude that while several digital twins have been developed, hardly any have been implemented in practice.