This paper analyses the impact of business process outsourcing (BPO) on firm productivity based on a comprehensive German firm-level panel data set covering manufacturing and service industries. The growing importance of service inputs into the production process is undisputed. Firms...

In 2008 and 2009, during the economic crisis, Germany's industrial enterprises invested considerably less in research and development (R&D). From 2010 to 2013, investments increased markedly again by an annual growth rate of 6.8 percent. This increase can be partly traced back to the process of...

Die Industrieunternehmen in Deutschland haben während der Wirtschaftskrise der Jahre 2008 und 2009 deutlich weniger in Forschung und Entwicklung (FuE) investiert. In den Jahren 2010 bis 2013 sind diese Ausgaben aber wieder deutlich gestiegen, um jahresdurchschnittlich 6,8 Prozent. Ein Teil...

Using a stochastic frontier model and a comprehensive dataset, we study factors that affect corporate efficiency in Europe. We find that (i) larger firms are less efficient than smaller firms, (ii) greater leverage contributes to corporate efficiency, and (iii) high competition is less...

In developing economies the purchase of a new machine by the firm can be a way of introducing a new product or processes. Under such considerations, this paper searches to measure the assumption of innovation via machine embodied technology, by verifying its impacts over the firm's productivity....

The study focuses on the question of whether productivity estimates are biased due to the emergence of a new input that is usually omitted: temporary agency worker (TAW). The study analyzes labor productivity and TFP by means of a structural approach using a representative dataset of German...

In this paper we study the capital adjustment process in Swedish manufacturing firms and relate the empirical findings to standard models of firm behavior in the presence of impediments to capital adjustments. We find that (i) a model with irreversible capital goes a very long way in capturing...

Foreign direct investment has been one of the main drivers of economic developments over the past few years in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Within the ongoing globalization and international division of labor, a large number of foreign companies have established production units in CEE...

This paper analyzes the efficiency of Czech small and medium enterprises. We use the data from 2002 to 2005 of thirty manufacturing industries, each divided into five subgroups according to the number of employees. We employ standard and advanced robust data envelopment analysis (DEA) to obtain...

This paper applies a stochastic frontier approach to analyze the evolution of technical efficiency in manufacturing as a source of regional growth, taking as a unit of analysis the Mexican states in the period 1988-2008. The main findings of our analysis are threefold. First, technical...