We analyse stylised facts for Germany's business cycle at the firm level. Based on longitudinal firm-level data from the Bundesbank's balance sheet statistics covering, on average, 55,000 firms per year from 1971 to 1998, we estimate transition probabilities of a firm in a certain real sales...

Economic disparities between the regions of the European Union are of constant concern both for policy and economic research. In this paper we examine whether there are overlapping trends of regional development in the EU: overall convergence on the one hand and persistent or even increasing...

The sensitivity of innovation activities with respect to the business cycle is often assumed to be small. In this paper the hypothesis on cyclical dependence of innovation activities is tested for firms in the German manufacturing, and additionally for SMEs. To this end firms? innovation...

The determinants of transitions between different states of financial distress are analyzed using two versions of Markov chain models: a multinomial logit model without random effects and a multinomial logit model capturing such unobservable factors. The empirical analysis is based on a panel...

We generalize the score test for time-varying copula parameters proposed by [Abegaz & Naik-Nimbalkar, 2008] to a setting where more than one-parametric copulas can be tested for time variation in at least one parameter. In a next step we model the daily log returns of the Commerzbank stock using...

This paper evaluates the evolution of European venture capital investments since 1990, using the distribution dynamics methodology. It tests and rejects the hypothesis that the international allocation of venture capital investments is driven by a pathdependent process of agglomeration, in which...