International immigration affects the degree of cultural diversity present in a labour force. This paper focuses on the consequences of immigration with respect to the level of cultural diversity by estimating employment functions for individual establishments. The theory behind the empirical...

After the crisis years of 2008 and 2009 EU countries followed different employment pathes. Employment and wage levels, for instance, are quite unevenly distributed across Europe. Some of the member states expect labour shortages due to demographic change in the future. If this is the case, wages...

Innovation is a key driver of technological progress and growth in a knowledge-based economy. There are various motives for individual firms to innovate: improving quality secures market leadership, introducing new products leads the firm into new markets, adopting new technologies could be seen...

Using comprehensive data for German establishments (1999-2008), we estimate plant-level production functions to analyze if “cultural diversity†affects total factor productivity. We distinguish diversity in the establishment’s workforce and in the aggregate regional labor force...

Theoretical and empirical contributions on export behavior highlight the importance of firms' productivity and their levels of economies of scale on firms' export success in `foreign’ markets. In the context of agglomeration economies, firms enjoy productivity gains when they are located close...

There is evidence from the literature that firms enjoy higher productivity levels when the workforce employed is culturally more diverse. It is an open question whether this gain is utilized to shift the supply curve and set lower prices, in order to achieve a higher demand and possibly higher...

Using comprehensive data for German establishments (1999-2008), we estimate plant-level production functions to analyze if “cultural diversity” affects total factor productivity. We distinguish diversity in the establishment’s workforce and in the aggregate regional labor force where the...

Urbanization and localization effects are known to boost the regional economy and its growth potential. The emergence of these effects is due to localized knowledge flows, the closeness to markets, but also due to the diversity of services and industries. All these effects have the potential to...