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...

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...

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...

Der Beitrag schildert die Effekte von Antwortausfällen bei einzelnen Fragen („item non-response“) auf die Ergebnisse von multivariaten statistischen Analysen. Dabei wird das Verfahren der „Data Augmentation“ angewendet, um die fehlenden Daten zu ersetzen (Schafer 1997). Anhand von...

Many recent studies exploring conditional factor demand or factor substitution issues use firm level panel data. A considerable number of establishment panels contains no direct information on the capital input, necessary for production or cost function estimation. Incorrect measurement of...

The paper presents a new framework to assess firm level heterogeneity and to study the rate and direction of technical change. Building on the analysis of revealed short-run production functions by Hildenbrand (1981), we propose the (normalized) volume of the zonotope composed by vectors-firms...

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...

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...

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...