This study uses tailor made enterprise level data from various sources for firms from manufacturing industries to test for the link between credit constraints, measured by a credit rating score provided by a leading credit rating agency, and imports in Germany for the first time. We find...

This paper investigates four cohorts of firms from German manufacturing industries that started to export in the years between 1998 and 2002 and follows them over the five years after the start. Export starters are a rare species and they are small on average compared to incumbent exporters....

This is the first study of the link between internationalization and firm survival during the 2008/2009 crisis in Germany, a country which was hit relatively lightly compared to other countries. Moreover, it is the first study which looks at the role of importing, exporting and FDI...

This note uses comparable representative data for manufacturing firms from five European countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) to investigate the links between firm age and the participation of the firms in export, the share of exports in total sales, the number of...

This paper documents the relationship between firm survival 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 for goods, that...

This paper uses unique new data for German manufacturing enterprises from matched regular surveys and a special purpose survey to investigate the causal effect of relocation of activities to a foreign country on various dimensions of firm performance. Enterprises that relocated activities abroad...

We use newly available representative panel data for manufacturing enterprises in West and East Germany to investigate the link between production-related subsidies and exports. We document that only a small fraction of enterprises is subsidized, and that exports and subsidies are positively...

This paper uses a newly available comprehensive panel data set for manufacturing enterprises from 2001 to 2005 to document the first empirical results on the relationship between imports and productivity for Germany, a leading actor on the world market for goods. Furthermore, for the first time...

Using data from the social survey ALLBUS for West Germany in the period 1980 to 2006, this paper demonstrates that union members are on average older than non-unionized employees. The probability of being unionized shows the inverted U-shaped pattern in age conjectured by Blanchflower (BJIR...

An empirical analysis of various waves of the ALLBUS social survey shows that union density fell substantially in western Germany from 1980 to 2004 and in eastern Germany from 1992 to 2004. Such a negative trend can be observed for men and women and for different groups of the workforce....