This paper follows up recent work on the relationship between (un-)employment and wage effects of social security financing undertaken by the OECD Jobs Study. Based on a simple macroeconometric model of the labour market, I investigate whether the peculiar OECD results for Germany on the...

The missing effect of investments of firms in information and communication technologies on productivity is studied by various recent papers (e.g. Oliner and Sichels 1994, Landauer 1995, Brynjolfsson and Hitt 1996). Several explanations are given for this missing link. Our paper deals with two...

At the start of the German unification process it was a commonly held view that east German living conditions will converge to west Geman levels within a few years. This view was not only held by notoriously optimistic politicians but also by a great many of professional economists. With...

We analyze the effectiveness of publicly financed training and retraining programs in east Germany as measured by their effects on individual re-employment probabilities after training. These are estimated by discrete hazard rate models on the basis of individual-level panel data. We account for...

I study the causal effect of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) on the productivity of German manufacturing firms. Using administrative firm-level data, I estimate robust production functions for narrowly defined industries. This approach allows for an endogenous dynamic...

This paper estimates the incidence of corporate taxes on wages using a 20-year panel of German municipalities. Administrative linked employer-employee data allows estimating heterogeneous worker and firm effects. We set up a general theoretical framework showing that corporate taxes can have a...

This paper analyses the relevance of information and communication technologies (ICT) for firms' probability of global sourcing of inputs. Using firm-level data from Germany in 2009, which include mainly small and medium-sized firms, the empirical analysis differentiates between manufacturing...

In this paper, I analyse the relationship between offshoring and ICT at the firm level differentiating between manufacturing and services. Using firm-level data from the manufacturing and service sector in Germany and a broad range of ICT measures, overall, the results reveal a positive...

This paper measures the productivity impact of management-led participative establishment practices. On the basis of a representative German establishment data set, the IAB establishment panel, the study finds that the presence of team-work, a reduction of hierarchies and autonomous work groups...

While there is a broad literature on the general wage effect of training, little is known about the effects of different training forms and about the effects for heterogeneous training participants. This study therefore adds two aspects to the literature on earnings effects of training. First,...