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...

Recently, integrating Transaction Cost Economic (TCE) and Resource Based View (RBV) arguments has become one of the most prominent theoretical approaches in research on business relationships. We question this dominance and strengthen an exclusive TCE perspective by recalling two of the core TCE...

For firms acting in technological niches the expansion into foreign markets can be a way to increase sales and to thus to recover initial sunk costs over a shorter time frame. Our research, based on survey data for nearly 600 British and German high-tech start-ups, examines whether...

This paper makes an empirical contribution to confirm the stylized fact that the performance of firms deteoriates in the years before exit. For this reason we evaluate whether market exits differ significantly in their employment development in the years before market drop-out compared to...

Ownership structures are an important element of the theory explaining corporate governance. This study presents detailed descriptive evidence on the ownership structures of German manufacturing firms. It addresses several shortcomings of the previous German empirical literature: First, we study...

In this paper it is tested which of the various alternative approaches for constructing knowledge spillover pools suggested in existing literature measures the extent to which a firm can costlessly receive external knowlegde best. Since knowledge spillovers are unmeasurable, a 'goodness of fit'...