This paper brings together two factors deemed important correlates of firm performance: advanced management practices and works councils. The country sample comprises nations where workplace representation is via a works council. The Management Questionnaire of the 2013 European Company Survey...

Despite massive digitization efforts, the German economy has experienced a marked slowdown in its productivity growth. This paper analyzes the reasons behind this disconcerting development. A major factor is the turnaround of the labor market that commenced around 2005. The successful...

Recently, building on the highly polarizing Stiglitz report, a growing literature suggests that statistical offices and applied researchers explore other aspects of human welfare apart from material well-being, such as job security, crime, health, environmental factors and subjective...

A theoretical model describes the local choice of the tax rate on capital income. It establishes preferences and various fiscal conditions - including the tax rates of competing jurisdictions - as determinants of the tax rate. The empirical implications are tested using a large panel of...

The production index is an important indicator for assessing the cyclical state of the economy. Unfortunately, the monthly time series is contaminated by many noisy components like seasonal variations, calendar and vacation effects. Only part of those nuisance components are explicitly...

The paper argues that economic integration causes problems for the labor market of high-wage countries due to cross-border labor mobility and the accompanying increase in labor supply. Empirical evidence is provided from an analysis of regional labor market effects of German re-unification. In...

In this paper, an Unobserved Components Model is employed to decompose German real GDP into the trend, cycle and seasonal components and the working day effect. The most important findings are: 1) The growth rate of potential output declined from 4.2 per cent in the sixties to 1.4 per cent at...

The concept of the employment threshold plays an important role in the public discussion of unemployment. The employment threshol d is defined as that growth rate of output which is necessary to keep employment constant despite the continuous rise in labour productivity. It is related to the...