In recent decades firms have intensified the exploration of external sources of knowledge to enhance their innovation capabilities. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the factors that affect the importance of academic knowledge for firms’ innovative activities. An integrated approach...

Services offshoring is on the rise. Due to recent innovations in communication technologies, many services that used to be non-tradable can be delivered from distance today. Still, German services imports have grown much slower than exports over the past decades, indicating under-exploitation of...

The 2005 reform of the German welfare system introduced two competing organizational models for welfare administration. In most districts, a centralized organization was established where local welfare agencies are bound to central directives. At the same time, 69 districts were allowed to opt...

This paper analyses the link between offshoring in German plants and the offshoring potential of their employees. We use information on the offshoring potential of jobs from representative task data and merge it with linked employer-employee data, for which information on different modes of...

Moderne Evaluationsmethoden auf der Basis ökonometrischer Verfahren und randomisierter Feldexperimente machen es für immer mehr Politikbereiche möglich, die Wirksamkeit wirtschaftspolitischer Maßnahmen zu überprüfen. Gleichwohl sind diese Methoden in der deutschen Evaluationspraxis nicht...

Using both household and linked employer-employee data for Germany, we assess the effects of non-union representation in the form of works councils on (1) individual sickness absence rates and (2) a subjective measure of personnel problems due to sickness absence as perceived by a firm's...

This paper analyzes the role of ethnic communities in shaping the recent immigration boom to Spain. We find that ethnic communities exerted a strong positive effect on the scale and a strong negative effect on the skill structure of this immigration. Unlike previous studies, we explicitly...

This study addresses the impact of offshorability (a job characteristic indicating how easily a job can be offshored) on employment changes and worker mobility in Germany. A composite measure of offshorability for German data is used which broadens existing measurements such as Blinder (2009)....

Das neue Konzept des „Regionalen Gewerbeflächenpools“ geht über den bisher bekannten Ansatz der interkommunalen Gewerbegebiete deutlich hinaus. Mit dem Poolkonzept werden nicht nur regionalökonomische Ziele verfolgt; vielmehr soll es auch einen Beitrag dazu leisten,den...