Der Europäische Rat von Lissabon hatte den Rat und die Kommission aufgefordert, bis Juni 2000 ein Benchmarking einzuleiten, dessen erste Ergebnisse bis Dezember 2000 vorliegen sollten. Die ersten greifbaren Resultate der Unternehmenspolitik werden im folgenden dargestellt.

This paper extends the standard Hotelling model with quadratic transport costs to the multi-firm case. Considering locational equilibria we show that neither holds the Principle of Maximum Differentiation - as in the duopoly model - nor does the Principle of Minimum Differentiation - as in the...

This paper contributes to the current corporate governance debate through describing changes that have taken place in Nokia during the past decade. It can be seen that traditional ways of corporate governance and management do not apply for companies operating in a fast changing business and...

This paper explores the reputations of 63 German firms over the period 1988 to1998. It considers what factors may affect firm reputations, and how and whyreputations change over time. The reputation data come from Manager Magazin’ssurvey that is similar to the one compiled annually in the US by...

In the past, environmental management mainly focussed on the identification of ecologically oriented requirements made on enterprises by relevant stakeholders, on the developmentof related corporate strategies and also on the introduction of a corporate system of environmental management....

The report summarizes the main results of the SME research that has been conducted in the framework of the “Sino-German Cooperation Program in Empirical Economic Research”, with the ifo Institute, Germany as the core unit to provide methodological support. The program focused on business cycle...

Even 50 years after Modigliani/Miller’s irrelevance theorem, the basic question of how firmschoose their capital structure remains unclear. This survey paper aims at summarizing anddiscussing corresponding recent developments in empirical capital structure research, which,in our view, are...

This paper empirically analyzes a particular type of notes observed insecuritization transactions: combination notes. Combination notes are formedby combining parts of two or more tranches of securitization transactions,where one part usually consists of a share of the first loss piece. It is...

This paper analyzes the impact of heterogeneous (social) preferences on theweighting and combination of incentive performance measures as well as on a firm’sprofitability within a principal-agent framework. Previous literature had failed torecognize heterogeneity effects. We consider rivalry,...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP), we analyze whethernecessity entrepreneurs differ from opportunity entrepreneurs in terms of self-employmentduration. Using univariate statistics, we find that opportunity entrepreneurs remain in selfemploymentlonger than necessity...