This paper first replicates Basu and Fernald's (1995) US results to find no externalities from aggregate West German manufacturing to gross industry output changes and approximately constant internal returns to scale. However, when we distinguish between upswings and downturns in aggregate...

Disaggregated data from 30 two-digit manufacturing industries in the east and west parts of unified Germany are used to estimate employment for three skill categories of blue collar workers. Employment elasticities are uniformly higher in the east, and for unskilled labor. The former result...