Sven Heim
Associate Professor of Economics · CERNA, Mines Paris – PSL
I am an Associate Professor of Economics at the Center for Industrial Economics (CERNA) at Mines Paris – PSL. I am also a Research Associate at ZEW Mannheim, a Research Member at the Paris Center for Law and Economics (CRED) at the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas, and a Research Affiliate at both the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and WU Vienna.
My research sits at the intersection of industrial organization, competition policy, and energy economics. A central strand of my work examines how minority ownership links between competing firms shape their incentives to compete, innovate, and collude. I also study how information frictions and consumer search drive pricing strategies and consumer behavior, as well as the effectiveness of state aid and EU competition policy.
In addition, I work on the economics of the energy transition and the design of electricity markets. My work on these topics has been published in leading academic journals, including the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, and the European Economic Review.
I advise institutions such as the European Commission and the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy, and serve as a court expert in cartel cases.
News
Our paper Support for Renewable Energy: The Case of Wind Power, joint with Ulrich Wagner (University of Mannheim) and Robert Germeshausen (TransnetBW), has been published in the Journal of Public Economics.
Abstract
The rise of societal goals like climate change mitigation and energy security calls for rapid capacity growth in renewable electricity sources, yet citizens' support is put to a test when such technologies emit negative local externalities. We estimate the impact of wind turbine deployment on granular measures of revealed preferences for renewable electricity in product and political markets. We address potentially endogenous siting of turbines with an IV design that exploits quasi-experimental variation in profitability induced by subsidies. We find that wind turbines significantly reduce citizens' support locally, but this effect quickly fades with distance from the site. We assess policy instruments for enhancing citizens' support for renewable energy in light of our results.
My proposal Minority Share Acquisitions, Innovation and Competition – MINCOM (ANR-23-CE26-0017) was accepted for funding by the French National Research Agency (ANR). The project examines how minority equity stakes between competitors affect innovation incentives and competition. Two PhD students are already working on the project: Emilie Feyler and Santiago Espinosa Moyano.
The article The Anticompetitive Effects of Minority Share Acquisitions: Evidence from the Introduction of National Leniency Programs (with Kai Hüschelrath, Ulrich Laitenberger and Yossi Spiegel) has been nominated for the Antitrust Writing Awards 2023 in the category "Economics".
The paper Incumbency Advantages: Price Dispersion, Price Discrimination and Consumer Search at Online Platforms, (with Klaus Gugler, Maarten Janssen and Mario Liebensteiner) has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics.
Abstract
When lower prices are only available to consumers who search, firms can price discriminate based on search. We study local German electricity retail markets where non-searching consumers pay the incumbent's baseline tariff. Using panel data, we show that in local markets with more search, incumbents have higher baseline tariffs, while incumbent's and entrants' online tariffs are lower.
My research on The Anticompetitive Effects of Minority Share Acquisitions has been published in the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics. An interview on the topic can be found here.
Measuring the effects of COVID-19-related night curfews: Empirical evidence from Germany, with Sammy de Haas and Georg Götz.
The book Ex-post Economic Evaluation of Competition Policy: The EU Experience, Edited by the European Commission, has been published. It includes a chapter by Kai Hüschelrath, Philipp Schmidt-Dengler, Maurizio Strazzeri and me.