Empirical investigations with enterprise level data from official statistics often use the averagewage as a proxy variable for the qualification of the workforce, mostly due to the lack ofdetailed information on the qualification of the employees. This paper uses unique newlyavailable data for...

This paper proposes a theoretical framework to analyze the impacts of credit and technologyshocks on business cycle dynamics, where firms rely on banks and households for capitalfinancing. Firms are identical ex ante but differ ex post due to different realizations of firmspecific technology...

This paper contributes to the literature on international firm activities and firm performance byproviding the first evidence on the link of productivity and both exports and foreign directinvestment (fdi) in services firms from a highly developed country. It uses unique new datafrom Germany -...

This paper extends the cross sectionally augmented panel unit root test proposed byPesaran (2007) to the case of a multifactor error structure. The basic idea is to exploitinformation regarding the unobserved factors that are shared by other time series in additionto the variable under...

While it is a stylized fact that exporting firms pay higher wages than non-exporting firms, the direction of the link between exporting and wages is less clear. Using a rich set of German linked employer-employee panel data we follow over time plants that start to export. We show that the...

Using data from 12 European countries and the variation across countries and over time inthe changes of minimum school leaving age, we study the effects of the quantity of educationon the distribution of earnings...

We investigate the effect of forecast uncertainty in a cointegrating vector error correctionmodel for Switzerland. Forecast uncertainty is evaluated in three different dimensions. First,we investigate the effect on forecasting performance of averaging over forecasts fromdifferent models...

This paper considers a multivariate t version of the Gaussian dynamic conditional correlation(DCC) model proposed by Engle (2002), and suggests the use of devolatized returnscomputed as returns standardized by realized volatilities rather than by GARCH type volatilityestimates. The t-DCC...

A recent survey of 54 micro-econometric studies reveals that exporting firms are moreproductive than non-exporters. On the other hand, previous empirical studies show thatexporting does not necessarily improve productivity. One possible reason for this result isthat most previous studies are...

Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality data at the plant level,this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between productivityand size of the export market for Germany, a leading actor on the world market formanufactured goods...<br<