Showing 1 - 10 of 75
While productivity growth in electricity generation is associated with multiple positive effects from an economic and environmental perspective, measuring it is challenging. This paper proposes a framework to estimate and decompose productivity growth for a sector characterized by multiple...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011392214
The idea of an industrial policy that promotes large businesses - heavyweights - as the best way to compete in a globalized world has become, again, en vogue among European politicians. The only apparent controversy about the idea revolves around whether it is better to promote national...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010264240
Scale characteristics are key properties of production functions that determine optimal firm sizes, and have considerable policy implications for sectors undergoing restructuring. However, estimates of scale characteristics typically vary with the assumptions of the underlying empirical model....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011453711
Business climate indicators are used to receive early signals for turning points in the general business cycle. Therefore methods for the detection of turning points in time series are required. Estimations of slopes of a smooth component in the data can be calculated with local polynomial...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010261265
After 20 years of transition from an economy integrated in an exchange scheme of planned economies towards an open market economy based on the ideas of competition, we ask whether East German firms succeeded in finding their place in the international division of labour. We concentrate on the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10003893733
Workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage. In particular, low-paid workers underestimate wages elsewhere. We document this anchoring bias by eliciting workers’ beliefs in a representative survey in Germany and comparing them to measures of actual outside...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013308108
We measure individual bias in labor market expectations in German survey data and find that workers on average significantly overestimate their individual probabilities to separate from their job when employed as well to find a job when unemployed. These biases vary significantly between...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014358858
We use a large micro-dataset to assess the importance of intangible capital - organisation, R&D and ICT capital - for the economic performance of establishments and regions in Germany. In 2003 self-produced intangible capital accounted for more than one fifth of the total capital stock of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009426700
East German wages have been below the West German wage level since unification. Moreover, the East-West wage gap implied by the contractual wages specified in collective wage agreements is drifting ever further apart from the wage gap in terms of effective wages. This paper looks at the role of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10002372295
We analyze whether start-up rates in different industries systematically change with business cycle variables. Using a unique data set at the industry level, we mostly find correlations that are consistent with counter-cyclical influences of the business cycle on entries in both innovative and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011822200