Empirical investigations with enterprise level data from official statistics often use the averagewage as a proxy variable for the qualification of the workforce, mostly due to the lack ofdetailed information on the qualification of the employees. This paper uses unique newlyavailable data for...

This paper proposes a theoretical framework to analyze the impacts of credit and technologyshocks on business cycle dynamics, where firms rely on banks and households for capitalfinancing. Firms are identical ex ante but differ ex post due to different realizations of firmspecific technology...

This paper contributes to the literature on international firm activities and firm performance byproviding the first evidence on the link of productivity and both exports and foreign directinvestment (fdi) in services firms from a highly developed country. It uses unique new datafrom Germany -...

This paper addresses the question of when and to what extent individuals are affected by major positive and negative life events, including changes in financial situation, marital status, death of child or spouse and being a victim of crime. The key advantage of our data is that we are able to...

We estimate the effect of early child development on maternal labor force participation using data from teacher assessments. Mothers might react to having a poorly developing child by dropping out of the formal labor force in order to spend more time with their child, or they could potentially...

This paper extends the cross sectionally augmented panel unit root test proposed byPesaran (2007) to the case of a multifactor error structure. The basic idea is to exploitinformation regarding the unobserved factors that are shared by other time series in additionto the variable under...

While it is a stylized fact that exporting firms pay higher wages than non-exporting firms, the direction of the link between exporting and wages is less clear. Using a rich set of German linked employer-employee panel data we follow over time plants that start to export. We show that the...

We investigate the effect of forecast uncertainty in a cointegrating vector error correctionmodel for Switzerland. Forecast uncertainty is evaluated in three different dimensions. First,we investigate the effect on forecasting performance of averaging over forecasts fromdifferent models...

We study the importance of childhood socioeconomic conditions in explaining differences inlife expectancy using data from a sample of around 5,000 children collected in the UK in1937-39, who have been traced through official death records up to 2005. We estimate anumber of duration of life...

This paper considers a multivariate t version of the Gaussian dynamic conditional correlation(DCC) model proposed by Engle (2002), and suggests the use of devolatized returnscomputed as returns standardized by realized volatilities rather than by GARCH type volatilityestimates. The t-DCC...