Using OLS and quantile regression methods and rich cross-section data sets for western and eastern Germany, this paper demonstrates that the impact of works council presence on labor productivity varies between manufacturing and services, between plants that are or are not covered by collective...

Using unique new data and a recently introduced non-linear decomposition technique this paper shows that the huge difference in the propensity to export between West and East German plants is to a large part due to differences in firm size and human capital intensity.

Information on the capital stock employed in a firm is missing in data sets from official statistics in Germany. This paper presents a method to estimate the capital stock of manufacturing enterprises that are covered by the cost structure survey from German official statistics. It uses data...

In Germany, for the reporting year 2009 transaction-level data on exports and imports of goods have been aggregated at the level of the exporting or importing firm for the first time. In these data the number of goods exported and imported and the number of countries exported to and imported...

This empirical paper documents the relationship between composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance (productivity and profitability) for a large representative sample of enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany. We use unique newly...

This paper uses a unique newly constructed data set to investigate for the first time the link between credit constraints and the extensive margins of exports in Germany, one of the leading actors on the international market for goods. In line with theoretical considerations and comparable...

This paper uses a tailor-made newly available data set for enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany to investigate for the first time the links between the extensive margins of imports (the number of imported goods and the number of countries imported from) and firm profitability....

A stylized fact from the emerging literature on the micro-econometrics of international trade and a central implication of the heterogeneous firm models from the new new trade theory is that exporters are more productive than non-exporters. However, many firms from the lower end of the...

This note uses a tailor-made new data set to investigate for the first time the link between the quality of a firm's exports and the distance to destination countries for Germany. To anticipate the most important result, it is shown that the quality of exported goods and the distance to...

This paper uses a tailor-made newly available data set for enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany to investigate for the first time the links between export diversification over destination countries and goods on the one hand and the profitability of the exporting firms on the...