This paper provides new evidence on the foreign direct investment stocks of German firms. We use firm-level data for the years 1990-2000 to describe the regional and sectoral patterns of German FDI through gravity-type equations. We provide evidence on the patterns of FDI by sector, by size of...

The question as to whether the globalisation-related increase in competitive pressure may have caused the importance of exchange rate pass-through and pricing-to-market for export pricing in Germany to shift since the 1990s is addressed by testing the long-run export pricing behaviour of German...

The purpose of this paper is to measure the potential impact of business-sector concentration on economic capital for loan portfolios and to explore a tractable model for its measurement. The empirical part evaluates the increase in economic capital in a multi-factor asset value model for...

The credit value-at-risk model underpinning the Basel II Internal Ratings-Based approach assumes that idiosyncratic risk has been diversified away fully in the portfolio, so that economic capital depends only on systematic risk contributions. We develop a simple methodology for approximating the...

In this paper we study political-economy determinants of the differentiation of environmental taxes between sectors. Using a common-agency model, we provide predictions on tax differentiation which are then tested using data from the German Ecological Tax Reform. As the reform is revenue neutral...

This study provides new stylized facts on the determinants of corporate failure and acquisition in Germany. It also offers important lessons for the design of empirical studies. We show that firms experiencing failure or acquisition are significantly different from surviving firms on a number of...

This paper studies the relationship between wages and the degree of firm heterogeneity in a given industry under different wage setting structures. To derive testable hypotheses, we set up a theoretical model that analyses the sensitivity of wages to the variability in productivity conditions in...

Recent Internet technologies and web-based applications, such as social software, are being increasingly applied in firms. Social software can be employed for knowledge management and for external communication enabling access to internal and external knowledge. Knowledge in turn constitutes one...

Although works councils are a core element of the German system of industrial relations, there is little reliable information on their incidence and coverage. This paper uses data from the nationally representative IAB establishment panel to fill this gap. We examine the frequency of works...