We develop a macroeconomic portfolio stress test that is specifically geared towards small and medium-sized banks. We combine a credit risk stress test which simulates credit impairments via a CreditMetrics type multi-factor portfolio model with an income stress test in the form of dynamic panel...

We analyze the relationship between managerial ownership and company performance, testing the incentive and entrenchment hypothesis. Differently from previous literature, we focus on small and medium-sized private enterprises which constitute an important part of the German economy. We use a...

This paper analyses the causal effects of weaker dismissal protection on the incidence of long-term sickness ( six weeks). We exploit a German policy change, which shifted the threshold exempting small establishments from dismissal protection from five to ten workers. Using administrative data,...

Voluntary environmental management programs for firms have become an increasingly popular instrument of environmental policy. However, the literature’s conclusion on the effectiveness of such programs is ambiguous, and for the European region there is a lack of evidence based on a large...

The manufacturing sector accounts for a substantial share of German GDP, employment and carbon emissions. Therefore, the manufacturing sector's energy use and carbon emissions are of crucial importance for reaching Germany's climate goals. In this paper, we analyse energy use patterns in German...

During the last years more and more discussions came up about the contribution of technology-oriented and technology-intensive industries for the economic development and employment. The estimates of the determinants of the regional number of firm formations point out differences between the...

Many studies of producer behavior consider cost and input demand functions de-rived from microeconomic theory and estimate them on the basis of aggregate data. If firms' characteristics differs, the neglect heterogeneity can lead to estimation bias. An alternative is to restrict individual...