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...

Virtually all empirical firm-level studies on the demand for labor do not include labor cost in the econometric specification. This is due to the fact that business and innovation survey data usually lack information on labor cost. This paper shows how reliable skill-specific and firm-specific...

The aim of the wage subsidy program in Hamburg is to encourage the creation of low wage jobs for unemployed persons with poor labor market opportunities. If a firm hires an unemployed job seeker, both the employer and the employee each receive a monthly wage subsidy of 250 Euros in the first ten...