This paper analyzes gender differences in the investment activity of German small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The empirical analysis is carried out on a sample of firms drawn from the KfW Mittelstandspanel, a representative survey of German SMEs for the period from 2003 to 2009. We find...

This unique insight into the corporate investment in Germany examines companies' finance needs and the constraints they face. The 2024 edition also provides insight into the pressing issues facing firms, such as climate change, high energy costs and the green transition. The survey, which has...

This unique insight into the corporate investment in Germany examines companies' finance needs and the constraints they face. The 2023 edition also provides insight into the pressing issues facing firms, such as climate change, high energy costs and the green transition. The survey, which has...

The ifo Investment Survey asks firms in the German manufacturing sector about the importance of sales, technological factors, finance, return expectations, and macroeconomic policy for their investment activity in a given year. We show that these subjective investment determinants 1) capture...

We document a new business cycle fact: the cross-sectional standard deviation of firm-level investment (investment dispersion) is robustly and significantly procyclical. This makes investment dispersion different from the dispersion of productivity and output growth, which is countercyclical....

In this article we study differences in the returns to R&D investment between firms that sell in international markets and firms that only sell in the domestic market. We use German firm-level data from the high-tech manufacturing sector to estimate a dynamic structural model of a firm's...