Michael Berlemann und Vera Jahn, Helmut-Schmidt-Universität Hamburg, liefern in diesem Beitrag eine qualitative und quantitative Abgrenzung des Mittelstands und zeigen auf, dass sich mit Hilfe dieser Abgrenzung die Hypothese stützen lässt, dass mittelständische Unternehmen...

The last decades have seen large improvements in digital advertising technology that allowed firms to better target specific consumer tastes. This research studies the relationship among digital advertising, the rise of varieties, and economic welfare. We develop a model of advertising and...

We develop a new monthly panel survey of business executives and a new question design that elicits subjective probability distributions over own-firm outcomes at a one-year lookahead horizon. Our Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU) began in 2014 and now covers 1,500 firms drawn from all 50...

We draw on the monthly Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU) to make three observations about pandemic-era uncertainty in the U.S. economy. First, equity market traders and executives of nonfinancial firms share similar assessments about uncertainty at one-year lookahead horizons. That is, the...

U.S. commercial banks are increasingly using credit scoring models to underwrite small business credits. This paper discusses this technology, evaluates the research findings on the effects of this technology on small business credit availability, and links these findings to a number of research...

Although there exists a vast literature on convergence and divergence of income levels across countries or regions at the aggregate level, there is only little work on convergence and/or diver- gence processes of productivity and wage levels at the more disaggregated industrial level. These are...

This paper focuses on comparisons of productivity, (unit) labor cost and industrylevel competitiveness for the manufacturing sector of China and India. We first provide a comparison between India and China using a broad international perspective. We find that China has increased its labor...

This paper presents a new framework for analyzing automation, robotics, and hightech, which differs from the canonical model of technological progress by incorporating the higher education system. The main difference is that there is not just one type of skilled workers, but two types, and there...

This paper highlights a new driver of inequality, that may become increasingly prominent over the years: the inequality between skilled workers graduating from elite universities and those from standard institutions. This paper emphasizes that heterogeneity in higher education is a key factor in...