Public procurement has been at the centre of recent discussions on innovation policy on both European and national levels (e.g., Aho-Report, Barcelona Strategy). It has a large potential to stimulate innovation since it accounts for 16% of combined EU-15 GDP. We embed public procurement for...

With the purpose to reduce winter unemployment and to promote all-season employment in the constructions sector, Germany maintains an extensive bad weather allowance system. Since the mid 1990s, these regulations have been subject to several reforms that resemble the range of approaches for...

The paper analyses the potential impact of stock market developments on lending behaviour from different perspectives. First we scrutinize the impact of stock market movements on the banks’ and on the borrowers’ balance sheets. Subsequently we estimate aggregate credit supply and demand...

Subsidising research networks has become a popular instrument in technology policies, driven mainly by expected positive spillovers. In particular, the stimulation of R&D co-operation between scientific institutions and industry is considered as most promising. In the context of policy...

This paper studies the impact of process and product innovations introduced by firms on employment growth in these firms. A simple model that relates employment growth to process innovations and to the growth of sales separately due to innovative and unchanged products is developed and estimated...

In light of nonstationary search theory (van den Berg, 1990), this paper estimates the effects of benefit entitlement periods and the size of unemployment benefits on unemployment durations and post{unemployment earnings in West Germany. For the unemployment duration, we estimate censored...

Recent labor market reforms in Germany aim, among other things, at reducing unemployment by restricting passive unemployment measures, emphasizing local labor market policies and re-structuring public employment services. This paper uses extensive individual administrative and regional aggregate...

From 2002–2004, the German government passed several laws that curtailed the generosity of the unemployment compensation system. One of the most ambitious changes was a considerable reduction in unemployment benefit entitlement lengths for older unemployed, which was effective during 2006 and...

This study presents a novel empirical approach to identify financing constraints for innovation based on the idea of an ideal test as suggested by Hall (2008). Firms were offered a hypothetical payment and were asked to choose between alternatives of use. If they choose additional innovation...