Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality longitudinal data at the enterprise level for Germany, this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between exports and profitability. It documents that the positive profitability differential of...

The paper provides evidence concerning incidence and sources of nominal wage rigidity in services and manufacturing, using a new and large employer survey on wage and price setting behaviour for Germany. We observe that wage freezes are more frequent in services than in manufacturing, whereas...

We analyze the productivity effects of environmental (green) investment as well as of environmental expenditures and energy expenditures. For this purpose, we follow a production function approach where we account for these investment and expenditure categories as inputs. Based on a panel...

In recent years, firms have increasingly contributed to and been confronted with a patent landscape characterized by numerous but marginal inventions, overlapping claims and patent fences. Literature suggests that both the fragmentation of ownership and the threat of a firm's patent applications...

A recent survey of 54 micro-econometric studies reveals that exporting firms are more productive than non-exporters. On the other hand, previous empirical studies show that exporting does not necessarily improve productivity. One possible reason for this result is that most previous studies are...

Outsourcing is widely associated with accompanied job losses in the outsourcing firm, at least in the short run. However, the medium and long run effects of outsourcing on employment growth might still be positive. This paper particularly focuses on IT outsourcing and its medium-term effects on...

Extending a recently developed multiproduct model and distinguishing between different product and process innovation activities, this paper reports new results on the relationship between innovation and employment growth in manufacturing and service firms in Germany. The model is tailor-made...

It is known that small firms rely mainly on the CEO’s individual knowledge for developing innovations. Recent work suggests that this approach is inefficient since it underutilizes other employees’ knowledge. We study to which extent using CEOs, managers and non-managerial employees’ ideas...

This paper analyses the relevance of information and communication technologies (ICT) for firms' probability of global sourcing of inputs. Using firm-level data from Germany in 2009, which include mainly small and medium-sized firms, the empirical analysis differentiates between manufacturing...