Between 1991 and 1997 West Germany spent on average about 3.6 bn Euro per year on public sector sponsored training programmes for the unemployed. We base our empirical analysis on a new administrative data base that plausibly allows for selectivity correction by microeconometric matching...

Previous empirical studies of job creation schemes in Germany have shown that the average effects for the participating individuals are negative. However, we find that this is not true for all strata of the population. Identifying individual characteristics that are responsible for the effect...

Bei der Vereinheitlichung der Lebensverhältnisse in Ost- und Westdeutschland spielen die Arbeitseinkommen eine zentrale Rolle. Nach der Übernahme des westdeutschen Tarifsystems werden auch in Ostdeutschland die Arbeitseinkommen durch Tarifverhandlungen von Arbeitnehmer- und...

This paper addresses three major aspects of firms' process innovative activity: forward- looking behaviour, uncertainty w.r.t. returns of R&D investments, and oligopolistic competition on the product market. Assuming that R&D expenditures are cost-reducing investments, we derive an Euler...

Based on new, exceptionally informative and large German linked employer-employee administrative data, we investigate the question whether the omission of important control variables in matching estimation leads to biased impact estimates of typical active labour market programs for the...

This paper studies the long-run relationship between consumption, asset wealth and income in Germany, based on data from 1980 to 2003. While earlier studies – mostly for the Anglo- Saxon economies – have generally documented that departures of these three variables from their common trend...

Recent literature on multinational firms has stressed the importance of low productivity as a barrier to the cross-border expansion of firms. But firms may also need external finance to shoulder the costs of entering foreign markets. We develop a model of multinational firms facing real and...