In an a priori view, it is usually assumed that the business cycle of manufacturing industries leads the business cycle of the service sector. This seems to be even more plausible for the relationship between business-related services, whose high growth rates in recent years were largely due to...

No other area of the German economy has developed so emphatically in the past ten years as has that business-related services. Regardless of its growing overall economic importance, official statistics fail to provide economic researchers and economic policy with current data on the...

Der Beitrag untersucht die Verbreitung von Tarifverträgen in Dienstleistungsunternehmen sowie deren Wirkungen auf die Beschäftigungspolitik im Falle von Nachfrageschwankungen. Der empirische Teil basiert auf der ZEW/Creditreform Konjunkturumfrage bei unternehmensnahen...

There is a growing concern about collective wage agreement and employment dynamics in Germany. In this paper, evidence is provided on the way collective wage agreements affect the adjustment of working hours, employment and other production factors when firms from the service sector are faced...

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...

This paper investigates if significant differences exist between online and paper & pencil participants in a quarterly business survey in the German business-related services sector when respondents may freely choose to respond either online or by more conventional methods. It also analyzes the...

The impact of technology on the demand for heterogeneous labor is controversely discussed throughout the literature. New technology which is said to favor high skilled labor and to substitute low skilled labor is often considered as the main reason for the decline in relative demand for low...