Does the salience of a topic affect polarization in related parliamentary debates? When discussing a salient topic, politicians might adopt more extreme stances to gain electoral consensus. Alternatively, they could converge towards more moderate positions to find a compromise. Using...

Information on the capital stock employed in a firm is missing in data sets from official statistics in Germany. This paper presents a method to estimate the capital stock of manufacturing enterprises that are covered by the cost structure survey from German official statistics. It uses data...

This paper makes three contributions. (1) It summarizes in tabular form a recent literature made of 36 micro-econometric studies for 16 different countries on the relationship between export destination and firm performance. (2) It reports estimates of the productivity premium of German firms...

I exploit exogenous changes in school year length in Germany in 1966 and 1967 to study the causal effect of education on health. Controlling for cohort, school track and Federal states fixed effects, which fully control for the assignment into treatment, reveals no differences in body weight,...

This paper documents for the first time the relationship between profitability and three types of international trade activities - exports, imports and two-way trade. It uses unique new representative data for manufacturing enterprises from Germany, one of the leading actors on the world market...

This paper investigates the effects of implementing a dual income tax (DIT) in Germany. We follow the reform proposal of the German Council of Economic Advisors (2003) and analyze its implications on capital formation, investment and welfare using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model....

This study presents the first investigation into the performance of foreign - controlled enterprises in German manufacturing based on new micro - data from official statistics. A comprehensive set of performance variables was examined not only by comparing unconditional mean values but also by...

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 paper documents the relationship between foreign ownership and firm survival for enterprises in Germany using unique tailor-made new representative data that merge information from surveys performed by the Statistical Offices, from administrative data collected by the Tax Authorities and...