The development of production, prices and employment in the EU electrical industry between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s is analysed in order to test the hypothesis that the competitive pressure from low-income countries has led to the observed decline of the employment share of low-skilled...

This paper examines the impact of innovations and wages on the demand for heterogeneous labour. Based on matched data from the IAB-establishment panel survey and the files of the employment statistics register for the year 1995, input shares derived from a generalised Leontief cost function are...

This paper uses a German employer-employee matched panel data set to investigate the effect of organizational and technological changes on gross job and worker flows. The empirical results indicate that organizational change is skill-biased because it reduces predominantly net employment growth...

Germany remains Europe's largest and most diversified source of new technology, but still lags in the fastest growing areas of today's high technology. After World War II, West-German technology policy sought to rebuild the institutions which had supported Germany's leadership in the high-tech...

Innovationen sind für die Wirtschaft eines Landes von außerordentlicher Bedeutung. Daher ist es wichtig, dass Ergebnisse und moderne Verfahrensweisen der öffentlich organisierten Forschung bei den Unternehmen ankommen. Dies betrifft vor allem Klein- und Mittelunternehmen (KMU), die hier noch...

This paper challenges the view that the wage structure in West-Germany has remained stable throughout the 80s and 90s. Based on a 2 % sample of social security records, we show that wage inequality has increased in the 1980s, but only at the top of the distribution. In the early 1990s, wage...

According to the Hutchens (1999) model, early retirement is not explained as a result of maximizing expected individual utility but rather as a demand-side phenomenon arising from a firm's profit-maximizing behaviour. Firms enter into contracts with their employees that include clauses about...