In 1996 Austria introduced a tax for the layoff of older workers, which was tightened in 2000. The regulation requires employers to pay a tax of up to 170 percent of the gross monthly income when they give notice to employees aged 50 or more. We use data from Austrian social security records to...

R&D expenditures of firms varies vastly between and within industries. In recent years a lot of theoretical and empirical studies attempted to explain the distribution of R&D expenditures. Four main factors repeatedly appeared in this literature: Firm size, market power, appropriability and...

We investigate whether the costs of job displacement differ between blue collar and white collar workers. In the short run earnings and employment losses are substantial for both groups but stronger for white collar workes. In the long run, there are only weak effects for blue collar workers but...

Employment termination in East Germany in the first nine months after unification is analyzed within a discrete hazard rate model with three absorbing states, namely short-time work, unemployment and non-participation. Estimation is based on a cohort of employed individuals in June 1990 and the...

Established theories in international business come to different conclusions when specifically applied to the analysis of the international activities of start-up companies in high-technology industries. Using a new dataset of 495 British and German start-ups operating in high-technology...

Among available policy levers to boost innovation, investment in applied research organisations has received little empirical attention. In this paper, we analyse the case of the Fraunhofer Society, the largest public applied research organization in Germany. We analyse whether project...

This paper examines whether the productivity growth in the West-German states is influenced by the provision of public infrastructure. Medium-term labour productivity growth and output growth varies a lot between German states. This differences are more pronounced during the eighties. The...

Based on the data of the first wave of the Mannheim Innovation panel, this paper explores the link between R&D expenditures and patents. Our data allow a detailed analysis of the firm size distribution of R&D and patent applications at different patent offices. It is shown that the share of R&D...