Based on an improved and extended database, the Establishment History Panel, we extend the analysis of Fritsch & Weyh (2006) by investigating the development of employment in German start-up cohorts for the period 1976 to 2004. We conïfirm the typical pattern of an initial increasing and then...

Based on an unbalanced panel of all Bavarian cooperative banks for the years of 1989-97 which includes information on 283 mergers, we analyze motives and cost effects of small-scale mergers in German banking. Estimating a frontier cost function with a time-variable stochastic efficiency term we...

Structural vector-autoregressive models are potentially very useful tools for guiding both macro- and microeconomic policy. In this paper, we present a recently developed method for exploiting non-Gaussianity in the data for estimating such models, with the aim of capturing the causal structure...

Questioning the underlying assumptions of the process of creative destruction, we conceptualize an alternative process of creative construction that may characterize the dynamics between entrants and incumbents. We discuss the underlying mechanism of knowledge spillover strategic...

This paper investigates whether the presence of ambitious entrepreneurs is a more important determinant of national economic growth than entrepreneurial activity in general. We use data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor to test the extent to which high growth ambitions of entrepreneurs...

In this paper the profitability of German car manufacturing firms is related to different indicators for the knowledge incorporated in the firms since the birth of the industry in 1886. The analysis is performed with an ordered probit model, where information about the kind of exit of the firms...

We apply a reduced-form vector autoregression model to analyze the growth processes of Italian manufacturing firms, 1989-1997. We focus in particular on lead-lag associations describing the coevolution of employment growth, sales growth, growth of profits and labour productivity growth....

Unter Fundamentalentscheidungen verstehen wir Entscheidungen bzw. Entscheidungssituationen von existenzieller Wichtigkeit. Dabei stehen wenige grundlegende Handlungsalternativen zur Wahl, die sich jedoch erheblich in ihren Wirkungen unterscheiden. Es handelt sich im Unternehmensbereich um...

The paper investigates the relationship between human capital diversity measured in terms of occupational diversity and a firm's likelihood to innovate. The empirical analysis is based on a linked employer-employee panel dataset of German firms over the period 1998 to 2007. Despite notable...

Recent work drawing on data for large and small firms has shown a Pareto distribution of firm size. We mix a Gibrat-type growth process among incumbents with an exponential distribution of firm's age, to obtain the empirical Pareto distribution.