Over the last few years, worldwide mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have increased sharply both in terms of value and volume. This development has not only been driven by corporate acquirers but also to an increasing extent by private equity investors. In this paper, we analyze differences in...

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) constitute a disruption to the working environment of the inventive labor force of the acquired company. If inventors would respond with a decline of their patent productivity or departure from the firm this can be detrimental to the innovative process within the...

While there is a large and growing number of studies on the determinants of corporate tax rates, the literature has so far ignored the fact that the behavior of governments in setting tax rates is often best described as a discrete choice decision problem. We set up an empirical model that...

Kleine Länder sind außenwirtschaftlich verwundbarer als große Länder und deshalb sind sie zur flexiblen Anpassung an weltwirtschaftliche Entwicklungen gezwungen. Dies setzt voraus, dass sie innenpolitisch diese Anpassungsprozesse realisieren können. Eine wichtige Voraussetzung hierfür ist...

We review the empirical literature that studies the effect of ethnic diversity on the welfare state and on individual attitudes. The outcome variables that we cover in the survey are on the one hand public spending, and on the other hand individual attitudes and behaviour, including charity...

Motivated by concerns about the organizational and institutional conditions that foster research creativity in science, we focus on how creative research can be defined, operationalized, and empirically identified. A functional typology of research creativity is proposed encompassing...

The aim of this paper is to study the optimal duration of unemployment benefit entitlement duration across the business cycle. We wonder if the entitlement duration should be prolonged in bad and shortened in good times. Because of consumption smoothing, such a countercyclical policy can be...

This paper studies the effects of political factors, mainly partisanship, on corporate taxes in the past 30 years - a period of intensifying competitive pressure in Europe. Extending the Zodrow-Mieszkowski model by decision-makers who have ideological preferences yields the hypothesis that...