Der positive Zusammenhang zwischen Firmengröße und Exporttätigkeit gilt als ein stilisierter Fakt: Gestützt auf deskriptive Befunde und Ergebnisse von Regressionsmodellen auf der Basis von Querschnittsdaten wird argumentiert, dass sowohl die Wahrscheinlichkeit zu exportieren als auch der...

In a recent paper Edward Lazear proposed the jack-of-all-trades view of entrepreneurship. Based on a coherent model of the choice between self-emlployment and paid employment he shows that having a background in a large number of different roles increases the probability of becoming an...

Folklore has it that the comparatively low proportion of self-employed in Germany is in part due to a habit that might be termed 'stigmatisation of failure': taking a second chance to build one's own firm after failing as a self-employed is said to be much more difficult here than in other...

An empirical analysis of various waves of the ALLBUS social survey shows that union density fell substantially in western Germany from 1980 to 2004 and in eastern Germany from 1992 to 2004. Such a negative trend can be observed for men and women and for different groups of the workforce....

Theory suggests that firms confront a hold-up problem in dealing with workplace unionism: unions will appropriate a portion of the quasi rents stemming from long-lived capital. As a result, firms may be expected to limit their exposure to rent seeking by reducing investments, among other things....

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.