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 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...

In western industrialized countries men are on average more than twice as active in entrepreneurship as women. Based on data from a recent representative survey of the adult population in Germany this paper uses an empirical model for the decision to become self-employed to test for differences...

In dieser Arbeit werden Auswirkungen des deutschen Schwerbehindertengesetzes auf die Arbeitsplatzdynamik mit Daten der Bundesagentur für Arbeit und des IAB-Betriebspanels empirisch überprüft. Die Daten erlauben eine Untersuchung der zweiten Schwelle des Gesetzes von 25 Beschäftigten, bei...

This paper uses data from a nationally representative panel of establishments to estimate the effects of German works councils on firm performance, 1997 - 2000. We analyze the impact of this institution on sales and sales growth using OLC and fixed effect estimates of a translog production...

Many plant-level studies find that average wages in exporting firms are higher than in non-exporting firms from the same industry and region. This paper uses a large set of linked employeremployee data from Germany to analyze this exporter wage premium. We show that the wage differential becomes...

Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality longitudinal enterprise-level data for Germany, this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between exports and profitability. It documents that the positive profitability differential of exporters...

Using OLS and quantile regression methods and rich cross-section data sets for western and eastern Germany, this paper demonstrates that the impact of works council presence on labor productivity varies between manufacturing and services, between plants that are or are not covered by collective...