The sensitivity of innovation activities with respect to the business cycle is often assumed to be small. In this paper the hypothesis on cyclical dependence of innovation activities is tested for firms in the German manufacturing, and additionally for SMEs. To this end firms? innovation...

Mit dem Ziel die technologische Wettbewerbsfähigkeit zu steigern, investieren die Staaten der OECD jährlich beträchtliche Summen in die Förderung von Forschungs- und Entwicklungsaktivitäten (FuE). Angesichts knapper öffentlicher Budgets ist der Effektivität und Effizienz dieser Förderung...

Barriers to entry are regarded as major impediments to the working of markets. Entry must not necessarily actually take place - the perceived threat of entry may encourage incumbent firms to behave as if they are in a competitive market, even if they are not. We present empirical evidence on...

Theory predicts a positive relationship between market concentration and profitability in most scenarios. In empirical work, however, this relation is frequently not found or only a weak connection is observed. We compare the performance of concentration and market share variables, which are...