"According to the German Works Constitution Act, establishments whose workforces exceed certain thresholds have to release a certain number of members of their works councils from their regular work and enable them to work full time as works councillors. Using a full sample of all establishments...

This paper investigates four cohorts of firms from German manufacturing industries that started to export in the years between 1998 and 2002 and follows them over the five years after the start. Export starters are a rare species and they are small on average compared to incumbent exporters....

"In der bisherigen Diskussion um die Beschäftigungseffekte des weltwirtschaftsinduzierten Strukturwandels in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland wurde der Aspekt vernachlässigt, daß der Arbeitsmarkt segmentiert ist. Theoretische Überlegungen und Ergebnisse empirischer Untersuchungen weisen auf...

"This paper makes an empirical investigation of the effects of the German Disabled Persons Act on employment dynamics using data from the Federal Employment Agency and the IAB Establishment Panel. The data permit an investigation of the second threshold of this law, which in the observation...

"In Germany, there exist around 160 threshold values stating that certain labour laws and regulations apply only in establishments above a critical size (usually defined by the number of employees). As crossing a threshold may result in additional costs for the firm, it is often hypothesized...

"In der bisherigen Diskussion um die Beschäftigungseffekte des weltwirtschaftsinduzierten Strukturwandels in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland wurde der Aspekt vernachlässigt, daß der Arbeitsmarkt segmentiert ist. Theoretische Überlegungen und Ergebnisse empirischer Untersuchungen weisen auf...

This paper investigates four cohorts of firms from German manufacturing industries that started to export in the years between 1998 and 2002 and follows them over the five years after the start. Export starters are a rare species and they are small on average compared to incumbent exporters....

This paper uses a newly available comprehensive panel data set for manufacturing enterprises from 2001 to 2005 to document the first empirical results on the relationship between imports and productivity for Germany, a leading actor on the world market for goods. Furthermore, for the first time...

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.

This paper uses unique new data for German manufacturing enterprises from matched regular surveys and a special purpose survey to investigate the causal effect of relocation of activities to a foreign country on various dimensions of firm performance. Enterprises that relocated activities abroad...