Die mittelständische Firma gilt seit jeher als Erfolgsmodell der deutschen Wirtschaft. So wird dem deutschen Mittelstand eine entscheidende Rolle im Rahmen des deutschen Wirtschaftswunders nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, bei der Bewältigung der deutschen Wiedervereinigung und der weltweiten...

Nach einhelliger Meinung zeichnen sich mittelständische Unternehmen vor allem dadurch aus, dass hier Eigentum und Leitung der Unternehmen in einer Hand liegen. Aber in der empirischen Mittelstandsforschung sowie beinahe allen Berichten, die sich mit der tatsächlichen Größe und der Bedeutung...

Germany’s comparatively good economic performance throughout the Great Recession of the years 2008/2009 is often attributed to the business model of the German Mittelstand firm. Somewhat surprisingly, this claim has never been backed by empirical evidence. In this paper we use micro panel data...

In a globalized world with high international factor mobility, crises often spread quickly over large parts of the world. Politicians carry a vital interest in keeping crises as small and short as possible. Against this background we study whether the type of company of owner-managed SMEs, in...

The lack of internationally comparable capital stock data has been a major obstacle to empirical studies of the contribution of the capital stock to economic growth. In this paper, we provide estimations of aggregate capital stocks for 103 countries in 2010. Depending on data availability the...

While most economists agree that the recent worldwide financial crises evolved as a consequence of the US house price bubble, the related literature yet failed to deliver a consensus on the question when exactly the bubble started developing. The estimates in the literature range in between 1997...

Based on an extended version of a time-inconsistency model of monetary policy we show that the degree of effective monetary policy conservatism can be uncovered by studying to what extent central banks react to real disturbances. By estimating central bank reaction functions in moving and...

Empirical studies analyzing the determinants of U.S. presidential popularity have delivered quite inconclusive results concerning the role of economic variables by assuming linear relationships. We employ penalized spline smoothing in the context of semi-parametric additive mixed models and...

Even after four decades of research it remains unclear, whether presidential popularity depends on the state of the economy. While about half of all studies for the United States find a significant effect of unemployment and inflation on presidential popularity, the others do not. Additional...