The question whether technological progress displaces employment or whether technological advance is beneficial for the level of employment has been in the core of economic dispute for over two centuries. The beneficial might be achieved by several compensation mechanisms within the economic...

Modern industrial development processes of new technologies are characterized by an increasing complexity and interdependence of different actors combining different knowledge assets. Today, hardly any innovation can be assigned to a specific technological field. Also, the sciences are becoming...

Using a large administrative dataset for Germany, this paper compares employment developments in exiting and surviving establishments. For both West and East Germany we find a clear shadow of death effect reflecting lingering illness: establishments shrink dramatically already several years...

This overview of transaction cost economics is organized around the "Carnegie Triple" - be disciplined; be interdisciplinary; have an active mind. The first of these urges those who would open up the black box of economic organization to do so in a modest, slow, molecular, definitive way, with the...

Effective monitoring requires proper incentives and detection skill. Detection skills depend on the extent of specialization in monitoring and on the number of agents to be supervised. This paper demonstrates that hierarchy and monitoring of monitors can provide the necessary incentives for the...

This paper derives a three stage Cournot?oligopoly game for product innovation, expenditure on introducing the product and competition on the product market. Product innovation is assumed to increase consumer utility but is effective only if the innovating firm invests in marketing, so that...

Personal linkage between the biggest German corporations is subject to a special survey by the monopoly-commission every two years. For the latest reporting year 2004 linkage-data is used to examine the impact of personal linkage on the compensation of management board members. The assumed...

One of the most conspicuous features of mergers is that they come in waves that are correlated with increases in share prices and price/earnings ratios. We use a natural way to discriminate between pure stock market influences on firm decisions and other influences by examining merger patterns...

The traditional argument that shorter product cycles favor trade secret over patenting is reviewed. A game theoretic model provides an argument that shorter product cycles can induce firms to file more patent applications. The firms may be trapped in a prisoners' dilemma where all firms would...

The dramatic drop in prices on the German stock exchange in the period from 2000 to 2003 was one cause for the rising number of delistings in Germany. This development triggered the study on the aptitude of listed companies to remain listed although the authors were well aware that a negative...