Empirical studies of the impact of changes in ownership of manufacturing plants on productivity (e.g., Lichtenberg and Siegel (1987, 1990a, 1990b), McGuckin and Nguyen (1995, 2001), and Maksimovic and Phillips (2001)) have provided limited evidence on how such transactions affect investment in...

Empirical studies of mergers and acquisitions typically focus on firm-level financial performance. In contrast, we use human capital theory to model these events as transactions that simultaneously have cross-level, real effects on workers, plants, and firms. Our empirical analysis is based on...

The paper explores the investment behaviour of German firms in the context of the Qapproach, which plays a dominant role in empirical investment research. The analysis is based on the Deutsche Bundesbank's corporate balance sheet statistics. The panel data set contains some 2,300 German firms'...

In January 2009 Germany introduced incentive regulation for the electricity distribution sector based on results obtained from econometric and nonparametric benchmarking analysis. One main problem for the regulator in assigning the relative efficiency scores are unobserved firm-specific factors...

In order to assess the productivity effects of information and communication technologies (ICT), regressions based on cross-sectional firm-level data may yield unreliable results for the commonly employed production function framework. In this paper, various estimation biases and econometric...

Innovation is widely considered as the main determinant of long-term economic growth. Despite this consensus, it is arduous to measure its economic effect at the firm and aggregate level. The objective of the present paper is to propose a critical examination of innovation indicators and...

We review the econometric literature on measuring the returns to R&D. The theoretical frameworks that have been used are outlined, followed by an extensive discussion of measurement and econometric issues that arise when estimating the models. We then provide a series of tables summarizing the...

Many analyses of firm performance are based upon self-reported measures. However, not only are these likely to be more subject to general reporting error than alternative official sources, but also measures of relative performance may be subject to the biases observed in the psychology...

Surveys of bank efficiency intrinsically draw conclusions based on the assumption that all banks in a sample use the same production technology. Neglecting the existence of unobserved differences in technological regimes might distort efficiency estimates by assigning incorrectly these...

A real wage rate is a nominal wage rate divided by the price of a good and is a transparent measure of how much of the good an hour of work buys. It provides an important indicator of the living standards of workers, and also of the productivity of workers. In this paper I set out the conceptual...