This empirical research note documents the relationship between composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance with respect to innovative activities (outlays and employment in research and development (R&D)) for a large representative sample of...

The current literature on firm ownership around the world shows that concentrated ownership with only one or a few controlling owners is common, especially in many European and Asian countries. The dispersed ownership has proven to be uncommon and even countries with supposed dispersed ownership...

Arguments for increasing gender diversity on boards of directors range from ensuring equal opportunity to improving firm performance, but the empirical results are mixed and often negative. Current research does not justify gender quotas on grounds of economic efficiency. Furthermore, in most...

There already exists broad literature investigating small and innovative firms in many respects. However, there have been few attempts to assess this group of firms´ propensity to patent or its patenting activities. This paper intends to fill that gap. By applying a new approach to account for...

This paper investigates the factors that explain the level and dynamics of manufacturing firm productive efficiency. In our empirical analysis, we use a unique sample of about 39,000 firms in 256 industries from the German Cost Structure Census over the years 1992-2005. We estimate the...

In this work we investigate two crucial dimensions of firms' structure and dynamics, that is profitability and productivity performance. The empirical distributions and the associated persistence over time are explored through a set of parametric and non parametric exercises performed on an...

Korean government has invested significant amount of resources through credit guarantee funds to promote SMEs survival, performance and R&D investment. This study attempts to identify determinants of provision of credit guarantees and estimate their effects on firms R&D expenditures. The...

This paper investigates the relationship between gender of the CEO and composition of the board of directors (female chairman and share of women in the boardroom) and firm's risk attitudes measured as variability in four firm outcome variables (investments, profits, return to equity, and sales)....

This paper analyzes the allocation of workers to jobs and the wage distribution in Germany. Our main contribution is to reconcile prominent empirical models of wage dispersion (Abowd et al., 1999; Card et al., 2013) with theoretical sorting models (Shimer and Smith, 2000; Eeckhout and Kircher, 2011;...

European electricity industry has recently come through liberalization. Surge of intakes with high share of cross-border deals was market players' response. Measuring of post-merger performance alterations is a central question of M&A literature. EU energy sector is responsible for significant...