We present a simple model, illustrating how democracy may improve the quality of the economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracies on economic institutional quality...

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...

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...