This paper investigates a unique policy designed to maintain employment during the privatization of East German firms after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The policy required new owners of the firms to commit to employment targets, with penalties for non-compliance. Using a dynamic model, we...

Recent research suggests that employment in young firms is more negatively impacted during economic downturns than employment in incumbent firms. This questions the effectiveness of policies that promote entrepreneurship to fight crises. We complement prior research that is mostly based on...

This paper investigates the effect of environmental innovations on firm profitability with respect to differences between small and medium-sized (SME) and large (LE) enterprises. Using data from the Mannheim Innovation Panel (MIP) 2015, results show that, in general, SME benefit more from...

We analyze a large merger in the Dutch banking market during the financial crisis using disaggregated data. Based on a merger simulation model, we evaluate merger-induced changes in the interest rates for savings accounts. We find that the merging banks decreased interest rates by 3 to 5 percent...

Despite the importance of business creation for the economy and a relevant share of new firms being started out of unemployment, most research has focused on analyzing the effect of unemployment insurance (UI) policies on reemployment outcomes that ignore self-employment. In this paper, we...

A set-aside restricts participation in procurement contests to targeted firms. Despite being widely used, its effects on actual competition and contract outcomes are ambiguous. We pool a decade of US federal procurement data to shed light on this empirical question using a two-stage approach. To...

The global economic crisis of 2008/2009 hit many firms hard. Faced with rapidly declining sales and highly uncertain economic prospects, firms had to cut costs and reconsider their business strategies. With respect to innovation, cost cutting often means to stop or underresource innovation...

This paper studies the impact of the adoption of ICT on the economic performance at the firm level, considering explicitly the interaction of adopting firms within the intermediate input market in Germany. The paper identifies and quantifies the importance of adoption externalities and knowledge...

This paper studies the impact of the adoption of ICT on the economic performance at the firm level, considering explicitly the interaction of adopting firms within the intermediate input market in Germany. The paper identifies and quantifies the importance of adoption externalities and knowledge...

The global economic crisis of 2008/2009 hit many firms hard. Faced with rapidly declining sales and highly uncertain economic prospects, firms had to cut costs and reconsider their business strategies. With respect to innovation, cost cutting often means to stop or underresource innovation...