Home equity is the most important part of a household portfolio, but only recently has it become more accessible through innovations in the mortgage market and financial deregulation. This study looks at the factors driving home equity withdrawal on a household level using Dutch survey data and...

This paper studies the relationship between export activities and firm-level productivity. Unique matching of German and Austrian micro data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that exporters are more productive by around 40 percent compared with non-exporters. Moreover, beside other analysis techniques,...

Patent holders frequently attempt to mitigate the loss of monopoly power by authorizing generic entry prior to patent expiry (early entry). Competition in off-patent pharmaceutical markets may be adversely affected if early entry substantially impairs the attractiveness of subsequent market...

This paper offers new insights on the price setting behaviour of German retail firms using a novel dataset that consists of a large panel of monthly business surveys from 1991-2006. The firm-level data allows matching changes in firms' prices to several other firm-characteristics. Moreover,...

This paper provides the first evidence on gender differences in investment financing, credit application and credit denial rates in Germany. The empirical analysis is carried out on a sample of firms drawn from the KfW Mittelstandspanel, a representative survey of German SMEs for the period from...

Online job search is becoming increasingly prominent and is viewed to improve the efficiency of the search process. OLS results suggest a negative association of DSL availability with unemployment rates across German municipalities. However, the roll-out of DSL networks is not random. This paper...

This paper evaluates the predictions of different price setting theories using a new dataset constructed from a large panel of business surveys of German retail firms over the period 1970-2010. The dataset contains firm-specific information on both price realizations and expectations....

This paper analyzes gender differences in the investment activity of German small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The empirical analysis is carried out on a sample of firms drawn from the KfW Mittelstandspanel, a representative survey of German SMEs for the period from 2003 to 2009. We find...

The compensation of executive board members in Germany has become a highly controversial topic since Vodafone's hostile takeover of Mannesmann in 2000 and it is again in the spotlight since the outbreak of the financial crisis of 2009. Based on unique panel data evidence of the 500 largest firms...