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...

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...

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...

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...

While it is a stylized fact that exporting firms pay higher wages than nonexporting firms, the direction of the link between exporting and wages is less clear. Using a rich set of German linked employer-employee panel data we follow over time plants that start to export. We show that the...

The compensation of executive board members in Germany has become a highly controversial topic since Vodafone's hostile takeover of Mannesmann in 2000 and it is again in the spotlight since the outbreak of the financial crisis of 2009. Based on unique panel data evidence of the 500 largest firms...

The German law on co-determination at the plant level (Betriebsverfassungsgesetz) stipulates that works councilors are neither to be financially rewarded nor penalized for their activities. This regulation contrasts with publicized instances of excessive payments. The divergence has sparked a...

International trade patterns at the product level are surprisingly dynamic. The majority of trade relationships exist for just a few, often only one to three, years. In this paper, I examine empirically the duration in German import trade at the 8-digit product level from 1995 to 2005. I find...

The objective of this paper is to address the question of convergence across German districts in the first decade after German unification by drawing out and emphasising some stylised facts of regional per capita income dynamics. We achieve this by employing non-parametric techniques which focus...

I use a question about works council relations from the 2006 wave of the IAB Establishment panel to analyze the heterogeneous effects of works councils on productivity, wages, and profits. The results indicate that the effects differ significantly between works council relationship types in a...