Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 22 January 2020
You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 22 January 2020, from 13.15 to 14.15 pm (!!). The seminar will be held in room Number LG 0.423. Christoph Moser (FAU) will be talking about “The European Commission and the Revolving Door”.
Please note the following: Unfortunately, Lorenz Küng (University of Lugano), the originally scheduled speaker just had to cancel his talk in the seminar on short notice due to private reasons. Our colleague Prof. Christoph Moser was spontaneously willing to present some of his recent work in order to avoid the cancellation of this week’s seminar. Note that in the interest of time we are planning to have alltogether only 60 minutes of seminar (45min. presentation + 15min. disussion). I am very happy that we have been able to organize things this way!
Please find below the abstract.
Decisions of the EU Commission have important consequences for the corporate sector. Thus, the fact that scores of ex-Commissioners go through the revolving door to work for companies raises concerns. Many suspect companies of profiting from privileged access to information and key decision-makers. We assess if companies indeed profit from hiring ex-Commissioners. Based on a unique dataset of all Commissioners who served in the Commissions of Jacques Delors I to José Manuel Barroso II spanning over 29 years, we look at stock market responses to announcements of such hirings. We find positive abnormal returns, which implies that investors anticipate benefits to companies. The reactions are larger for hirings in the first two years after a former Commissioners left office when connections and insider knowledge are still fresh.