In Germany, many labour laws and regulations apply only in establishments above a critical size, and usually these thresholds are defined by the number of employees. The existing 160 thresholds are complex and defined inconsistently, making it difficult for firms to obey the law. Moreover,...

Using the approach suggested by Gabaix (Econometrica 2011) this paper demonstrates that idiosyncratic shocks in the largest firms are important for an understanding of aggregate volatility in German manufacturing industries. The implications of this finding for theoretical and empirical research...

This paper uses comprehensive high-quality panel data from official statistics for exporting enterprises to investigate the micro-structure of the recent export recovery in 2010 in manufacturing industries in Germany after the great recession of 2008/2009. Almost all of the increase in exports...

Empirical investigations with enterprise level data from official statistics often use the average wage as a proxy variable for the qualification of the workforce, mostly due to the lack of detailed information on the qualification of the employees. This paper uses unique newly available data...

This paper uses a difference-in-differences approach to test the hypothesis that the increase in the per-shipment costs of imports from Japan due to the Fukushima disaster in 2011 lead to an increase in the lumpiness of imports from Japan. Using China and the USA as control groups it is found...

This paper contributes to the literature by documenting for the first time the contribution of adding (and dropping) goods and countries of origin to the sharp increase in imports of goods in the German economy as a whole during the Great Import Recovery in 2009/2010. The empirical investigation...