Based on a sample of German innovating firms that contains information on formal and informal innovation cooperation between customers and suppliers, we state that firms perceive informal cooperation as being more important than formal cooperation modes. We then investigate the determinants of...

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...

For firms acting in technological niches the expansion into foreign markets can be a way to increase sales and to thus to recover initial sunk costs over a shorter time frame. Our research, based on survey data for nearly 600 British and German high-tech start-ups, examines whether...

This paper makes an empirical contribution to confirm the stylized fact that the performance of firms deteoriates in the years before exit. For this reason we evaluate whether market exits differ significantly in their employment development in the years before market drop-out compared to...

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...

This paper tests some of the predictions of recent advances in trade theory that have focused on different trade patterns of firms within the same sector. Helpman, Melitz and Yeaple (2005) develop a model in which innate productivity differences between firms determine the degree of...

We examine job durations of German workers using a linked employeremployee dataset. The descriptive evidence suggests that firm characteristics have a substantial influence on the job exit rate. However, the extent of dispersion in durations is not substantially lower at the firm level than for...

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...

In many situations the applied researcher wants to combine different data sources without knowing the exact link and merging rule. This paper introduces a theoretical framework how two different regional administrative data sources can be merged. It presents different merging schemes based on...