According to the German disability law, or Schwerbehindertengesetz, either six percent of all jobs in an establishment must be occupied by disabled empoyees or the firm has to pay a penalty of DM 200 per month for every job under consideration. This note reports results from the first...

German law guaranteeing works councils is not a datum. The thrust of legislation has changed significantly on a number of occasions since 1920. The most recent legal change in the form of the Works Constitution Reform Act marks a controversial swing in favor of works council formation and...

This empirical paper documents the relationship between composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance (productivity and profitability) for a large representative sample of enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany. We use unique newly...

This empirical research note documents the relationship between composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance with respect to innovative activities (outlays and employment in research and development (R&D)) for a large representative sample of...

Using quantile regression and a rich cross section data set for German manufacturing plants this paper documents that the impact of plant characteristics on export activities varies along the conditional size distribution of the export/sales ratio.

This paper presents the first empirical test with German establishment level data of a hypothesis derived by Helpman, Melitz and Yeaple in a model that explains the decision of heterogeneous firms to serve foreign markets either trough exports or foreign direct investment: only the more...

This paper starts from the stylized fact that firm size and exporting tends to be positively related. Using large sets of establishment panel data for three different industries from official statistics evidence is presented that the familiar picture of an export/sales ratio that ceteris paribus...

Using a knowledge production framework and a rich set of plant level data this study demonstrates that in Germany firms that are active on international markets as exporters or foreign direct investors do generate more new knowledge than firms which sell on the national market only. These...