A substantial number of outside directors have experience in politics or government and in the private practice of law. We argue that, in part, these directors play a political role by providing advice and insight into the workings of government (or perhaps, by acting to influence the government...

In this study, we compared the profile of German Transnational Patents with the patenting profiles of other countries from several different angles. Germany is a stronghold in international patenting in terms of the absolute number of filings (ranked the third only after the United States and...

This paper investigates whether self-employed households use consumer loans - in particular instalment loans and overdrafts - to finance business activities. Controlling for financial and non-financial household variables we show that self-employed households particularly use personal overdrafts...

One proposal frequently raised to increase flexibility of the German labour market is the liberalization of the job protection law. It applies to those establishments with more than a cut-off number of employees. The argument examined in this paper is that this step in legal regulation hinders...

We test how bank market power influences technical change and resource allocation of informationally opaque firms. We use a dataset with approximately 700,000 firm-year observations of German small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) to identify the effect of bank market power using the...

Using internal data of a leasing company in Germany, we examine the determinants of the probability and use of leasing by small firms. We find that small and young firms are likely to be constrained on the leasing market but use leasing to increase their debt capacity. Beyond contract- and...

Strong lending relationships between banks and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a key role in the bank-based financial system of Germany. So far, they have been mainly described by the notion of an housebank and transactional features of long-term bank-customer relationships. The...

Strong lending relationships between banks and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a key role in the bank-based financial system of Germany. So far, they have been mainly described by the notion of a housebank and transactional features of long-term bank-customer relationships. In...