Retraining the labor force to match the demands of a modern economy is an important task during the transition process from a centrally planned to a market economy. This need is particular pressing in East Germany, because the transition process is much faster there than in the rest of Eastern...

New firm set ups, especially in High Tech industries, can give important impulses for the technological development and the catch up process in the Neuen Bundes1aender. The paper at hand gives an overview about the formation behaviour considering the preconditions of the former German Democratic...

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...

In this paper, we report results of an ongoing empirical analysis of firm dynamics in East Germany. After discussing specifics of a newly available data set with information on more than 100.000 firms, we analyze patterns of business starts and failures. Furthermore, we present preliminary...

In this paper, we analyse the influence of firm characteristics and the regional environment on employment growth of East German manufacturing firms between 1992 and 1996. Our results confirm the negative impact of firm size and age on employment growth found in various studies for several...