In der deutschen Chemieindustrie ging die Zahl der Beschäftigten von 1992 bis 2004 deutlich zurück, und die durchschnittliche Unternehmensgröße sank von 824 auf 433 Beschäftigte. Die Triebfeder dieser Entwicklung war weniger die Beseitigung technischer oder organisatorischer Ineffizienzen....

German chemical manufacturing industry is marked by two major structural changes during 1992-2004. Firstly, number of firms was ranging extensively: from 676 to 901, while only 96 firms represented balanced panel. Secondly, size of the firm dropped considerably-by 88%. This paper is intended to...

At the firm level, revenue and costs are well measured but prices and quantities are not. This paper shows that because of these data limitations estimates of returns to scale at the firm level are for the revenue function, not production function. Given this observation, the paper argues that,...

This paper studies the aggregate substitution and expansion effects triggered by changes in input prices, in a context where firms supply a homogenous commodity and compete in quantities à la Cournot. We derive a sufficient condition for the existence of a Cournot equilibrium and show that this...

Attempts can be found in the DEA literature to identify returns to scale at efficient interior points of the production possibility set on the basis of returns to scale at points of the corresponding reference sets. However, an opposite approach is put forward in this paper, advocating that...

This paper argues that the conventional definition of the elasticity of complementarity is not well suited to deal with the case of increasing returns. It proposes a slightly different formula, that uses a distance function formulation instead of a production function. The proposed definition...

This paper asserts that beyond certain scale thresholds several factors contribute to diseconomies of scale for individual production units, particularly with regard to the costs of non-renewable resource consumption. Economic instruments such as environmental taxes may induce a shift towards...

Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden wesentlichen Merkmale eines Too Big To Fail (TBTF) Regimes diskutiert. Hierunter wird ein politisches Umfeld verstanden, in dem grosse, systemrelevante Finanzinstitute durch staatliche Massnahmen vor der Insolvenz gerettet werden. Das TBTF Regime rechtfertigt sich...

While available evidence suggests that the events of September 11th negatively influenced the relative earnings of employees with Arab background in the US, it is not clear that they had similar effects in other countries. Our study for Germany provides evidence that the events also affected the...

The paper examines the labour quality explanation of the employer size?wage gap: larger firms pay higher wages because they employ more skilled workers. Most previous studies control for unobserved skills of workers using longitudinal data and the fixed effects estimator thus relying on a...