The paper analyses the impact of venture capital finance on growth and innovation activities of young German firms. Among other variables, our panel of firm data includes data on venture capital funding and patent applications. With a statistical matching procedure we draw an adequate control...

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 analyses the effects of a social assistance reform in Germany. In contrast to studies which are based on microsimulation methods we use a computable general equilibrium model which incorporates a discrete choice model of labour supply to simulate a variety of reform scenarios. The...

Mit dem Ziel die technologische Wettbewerbsfähigkeit zu steigern, investieren die Staaten der OECD jährlich beträchtliche Summen in die Förderung von Forschungs- und Entwicklungsaktivitäten (FuE). Angesichts knapper öffentlicher Budgets ist der Effektivität und Effizienz dieser Förderung...

The German biotechnology industry missed the accession of this key technology in the 1980s. Policy makers make different efforts to overcome shortcomings and recent gaps. Public funding schemes have been implemented to establish a flourish biotech industry in Germany. We assume that R&D policy...

Germany1, as most other European countries, has been plagued by a persistently high level of long?term unemployment since the early 1980's. In contrast, long? term unemployment is much less of a problem in the United States. One potential reason for the different structure of unemployment...

We analyze the effectiveness of publicly financed training and retraining programs in east Germany as measured by their effects on individual re-employment probabilities after training. These are estimated by discrete hazard rate models on the basis of individual-level panel data. We account for...

We analyze the dramatic decline of the employment share of unskilled labor in the West German economy, in particular its relation to the relatively rigid earnings structure. We find that the substitution elasticity between unskilled and skilled labor is rather low in most sectors of the economy....

In the paper we simulate a revenue-neutral cut in the social security contribution rate using five different types of macro- / microeconomic models, namely two models based on time-series data where the labour market is modelled basically demand oriented, two models of the class of computable...

The paper deals with growth determinants of innovative and noninnovative start-ups in Eastern and Western Germany. Based on theoretical approaches explaining the growth of firms, hypotheses on potential determinants are derived. The empirical results indicate strong correlations between average...