With the purpose to reduce winter unemployment and to promote all-season employment in the constructions sector, Germany maintains an extensive bad weather allowance system. Since the mid 1990s, these regulations have been subject to several reforms that resemble the range of approaches for...

This paper studies the introduction of new products (increase in product variety) in the automobile industry. The focus is on the two sources of market power that may allow the firms to get higher profits (and, thus, recoup investments): new products and brand-name reputation. The effects of new...

Globalization has provided many companies with new opportunities for growth and efficiency. This requires them to operate successfully across cultural and social borders. These can be stumbling blocks to internationalization and have been found to cause frequent errors and delays for...

We explore the determinants and effects of trust relationships between upstream suppliers and downstream producers. Using unique survey data on individual supplier-buyer relationships in the German automotive industry, we show, by means of different measures of supplier-buyer trust, that higher...

Globalization has led to exciting new business opportunities around the globe. Still, national and cultural boundaries have not evaporated into a borderless world.ʺ Several studies have identified so-called liabilities of foreignness that arise from a lack of embeddedness and roots in the host...

The influence of innovative entrants on incumbents is considered important for technological change. We analyze this influence for the global transition towards alternative technology vehicles (ATVs). Our results indicate that entrants' ATV-related knowledge accumulation stimulates average...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer - the seller - follows from a nontrivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer-induced certification acts as an inspection device,...

We provide an overview of public support for the European car industry during the past decade. First, we identify the most relevant instruments of public support, and review their economic assessment. The European Commission increasingly recognizes the role of economic analysis in controlling...

We study the effects of the car scrapping subsidies in Europe during the financial crisis. We make use of a rich data set of all car models sold in nine European countries, observed at a monthly level during 2005-2011.We employ a difference-in-differences approach, exploiting the fact that...

This paper shows that earnings losses after unemployment increase with age. First, older employees start out with relatively high earnings in comparison to employees without employment interruptions several years before the non-employment spell. This earnings advantage turns into a strong...