We analyze the performance of firms in the German business-related services sector. A quarterly business survey provides the panel data base of our study. Firm performance is measured by the survey respondents' ordinal indication of their changes in total sales. We use a firstorder Markov chain...

During the last 20 years, R&D and innovation activities in the service sector have clearly increased. Especially business services are believed to be one of the main drivers of technical changes and economic progress. Looking at the labour indices calculated over the period from 1982 to 1996 one...

In this paper we examine causal effects of German public assistance programs for young firms administered by the Deutsche Ausgleichsbank (DtA). The empirical analysis is based on a combined data set with information from the ZEW Entrepreneurship Study and the DtA data base that contains all...

In recent times the service sector is often called the driving force of today's economies. This paper analyses the innovative activities of German service firms. We investigate whether firms that receive public subsidies for innovation projects engage more in innovative activities than others....

Between 1993 and 1995, the majority of German firms in services introduced new organizational practices (OC), in particular total quality management systems, certified ISO 9000, lean administration, flatter hierarchies, delegation of authority and ICT-enabled organizational changes). This paper...

We propose a structural vector-autoregressive model for the German natural gas market to investigate the impact of the 2022 Russian supply stop on the German economy. We combine conventional and narrative sign restrictions to leverage information about supply cuts for identification and find...