Recent studies have documented extensive heterogeneity in firm performance within countries, and innovation has been found as an important determinant. This paper addresses the issue of innovation firm performance across countries. A growing number of national firm level studies on the...

Social assistance and unemployment assistance, which provide means tested income support (social welfare) without pre-specified time limits, are viewed as one important reason for the persistently high level of unemployment in Germany by many economists. In order to increase work incentives and,...

This paper measures the productivity impact of management-led participative establishment practices. On the basis of a representative German establishment data set, the IAB establishment panel, the study finds that the presence of team-work, a reduction of hierarchies and autonomous work groups...

While there is a broad literature on the general wage effect of training, little is known about the effects of different training forms and about the effects for heterogeneous training participants. This study therefore adds two aspects to the literature on earnings effects of training. First,...

This paper presents and compares several time-series models for returns of broadbased stock indices. These models nest a nonlinear asymmetric GARCH (NGARCH) model as a special case. Some of these models are empirically motivated ad-hoc specifications others are derived from a representative...

Using the model recently developed by Jaumandreu (2003) this paper reports new results on the relationship between innovation and employment growth in Germany. The model is tailor-made for analysing firm-level employment effects of innovations using specific information provided by CIS data. It...

This paper investigates to what extent the usage of information and communication technology (ICT) fosters innovation activities by facilitating more flexible organisational structures in firms. We distinguish between functional flexibility (the ability of workers to co-operate and take...

This paper investigates whether firms innovate persistently or discontinuously over time using an innovation panel data set on German manufacturing and service firms for the period 1994?2002. We find that innovation behaviour is permanent at the firm?level to a very large extent. Using a dynamic...

As a group, market forecasters are egregiously overconfident. In conformity to the dynamic model of overconfidence of Gervais and Odean (2001), successful forecasters become more overconfident. What?s more, more experienced forecasters have ?learned to be overconfident,? and hence are more...