According to the German disability law, or Schwerbehindertengesetz, either six percent of all jobs in an establishment must be occupied by bisabled employees or the firm has to pay a penalty of DM 200 per month for every job under consideration. This note reports results from the first...

In a survey published in this Journal, 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". The present treatment offers a very...

Using a large panel data set we investigate whether works councils act as a sand or grease in the operation of German firms. Stochastic production frontier analysis indicates that establishments with and without a works council do not exhibit significant differences in efficiency

This paper deals with innovative activities of firms, the resulting market success as well as the interdependencies between both. In a first theoretical part, different cases of those interdependencies are investigated by the way of a simple model based on replicator dynamics. It is shown that...

We attempt to extend the static analysis of innovator networks by providing case study based insights into the dynamic, developmental or evolutionary pattern of such networks. In the theoretical part, we develop some building blocs that are considered central to a theory of network evolution....