This paper analyses the impact of business process outsourcing (BPO) on firm productivity based on a comprehensive German firm-level panel data set covering manufacturing and service industries. The growing importance of service inputs into the production process is undisputed. Firms...

Organisation capital is one of the key intangible assets of firms, driving innovation and firm performance. Measuring this asset has been notoriously difficult, however. Differently to other intangible assets, firms do not build up organisation capital primarily by monetary investment but rather...

Using panel data for German and Dutch firms from the services sector, this paper analyses the importance of ICT capital deepening and innovation for productivity. We employ a model that takes into account that innovation and ICT use may be complementary. The results show that the contribution of...

The creation of spinoff companies is often promoted as a desirable mechanism for transferring knowledge and technologies from research organizations to the private sector for commercialization. In the promotion process, policymakers typically treat these “university” spinoffs like industry...

New firms are regarded to be of substantial importance for the development of an economy, especially for innovation, growth, and the creation of jobs. However, new firms also face a high risk of failure. Thus, there seem to be high try-out costs connected with the establishment of firms. In...

The participation of women in top-level corporate boards (or rather the lack of it) is subject to intense public debate. Several countries are considering legally binding quotas to increase the share of women on boards. Indeed, research on board diversity suggests positive effects of gender...

Many studies found that women-owned firms underperform when comparing performance indicators at an aggregate level. The performance gap might be attributed to gender differences in personal and firm characteristics affecting performance. However, previous studies were not able to entirely...

The rapid diffusion of open source software (OSS), the significant investments observed in OSS projects, and the new inter-firm collaborative possibilities enabled by such OSS projects have generated a substantial literature on the economics of OSS development. However, this literature mainly...

The impact of environmental innovations on firm performance is ambiguous. On the one hand, regulatory-driven environmental innovation may impose additional costs to firms and lower their profits. On the other hand, eco-innovators could profit from lower uncertainty in innovation due to...

Using German firm-level data, an endogenous switching regression model within a production function framework is estimated in order to explore differences in labor productivity between IT outsourcing and non-IT outsourcing firms. This approach takes possible complementarities between IT...