In an a priori view, it is usually assumed that the business cycle of manufacturing industries leads the business cycle of the service sector. This seems to be even more plausible for the relationship between business-related services, whose high growth rates in recent years were largely due to...

No other area of the German economy has developed so emphatically in the past ten years as has that business-related services. Regardless of its growing overall economic importance, official statistics fail to provide economic researchers and economic policy with current data on the...

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...

There is a growing concern about collective wage agreement and employment dynamics in Germany. In this paper, evidence is provided on the way collective wage agreements affect the adjustment of working hours, employment and other production factors when firms from the service sector are faced...

This paper investigates if significant differences exist between online and paper & pencil participants in a quarterly business survey in the German business?related services sector when respondents may freely choose to respond either online or by more conventional methods. It also analyzes the...

This paper presents structural estimates for a bargaining model which nests the right-to-manage, the efficient wage bargaining, the seniority and the standard neo- classical labor demand model as special cases. In contrast to most existing models, our approach accounts for heterogeneous skill...

No other area of the German economy has developed so emphatically in the past ten years as that of business-related services. Regardless their growing importance, business-related services still play only a minor role in official statistics. Above all, official statistics do not provide...

In an a priori view, it is usually assumed that the business cycle of manufacturing industries leads the business cycle of the service sector. This seems to be even more plausible for the relationship between business-related services, whose high growth rates in recent years were largely due to...