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...

In a sharp break with past German research, some recent estimates have suggested that plants with work councils have 25 to 30 per cent higher productivity than their works-councilfree counterparts. Such findings can only serve to buttress the strong theoretical and policy interest in the German...

Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality longitudinal data at the enterprise level for Germany, this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between exports and profitability. It documents that the positive profitability differential of...

In empirical studies it often happens that some variables for some units are far away from the other observations in the sample. These extreme observations, or outliers, often have a large impact on the results of statistical analyses – conclusions based on a sample with and without these...

This paper makes three contributions. (1) It summarizes in tabular form a recent literature made of 36 micro-econometric studies for 16 different countries on the relationship between export destination and firm performance. (2) It reports estimates of the productivity premium of German firms...

This paper documents for the first time the relationship between profitability and three types of international trade activities – exports, imports and two-way trade. It uses unique new representative data for manufacturing enterprises from Germany, one of the leading actors on the world...

In a survey published in the British Journal of Industrial Relations, Frege (2002) evaluates research on the German works council from the perspective of several disciplines, including economics. Ultimately, she concludes that economic analysis of the works council has reached a ‘dead end’....