Researchers in Germany have nowadays access to confidential micro-data compiled from official statistics in a way that could not have been dreamt of just a few years ago. This article describes the new institutions that grant data access most importantly the research data centers located inside...

This article presents the first nonparametric test whether German works councils go hand-in-hand with higher labour productivity or not. It distinguishes between establishments that are covered by collective bargaining or not. Results from a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for first-order stochastic...

This study presents the first empirical test with German establishment level data of a hypothesis derived by Helpman et al. (2004) in a model that explains the decision of heterogeneous firms to serve foreign markets either through exports of foreign direct investment: only the more productive...

Using a large recent representative sample of the adult German population this paper demonstrates that nascent necessity and nascent opportunity entrepreneurs are different with respect to some of the characteristics and attitudes considered to be important for becoming a nascent entrepreneur,...

Using quantile regression and a rich cross section data set for German manufacturing plants this paper documents that the impact of plant characteristics on export activities varies along the conditional size distribution of the export/sales ratio. For example, firm size is statistically...

Interest in the theoretical and empirical analysis of multi-product enterprises is growing. This paper uses newly available representative longitudinal data covering the years 1995 to 2004 to document for the first time the extent of product diversification in German manufacturing enterprises...