The economic development in East Germany after unification shows both, success and failure. In the early nineties wages and productivity increased fast; later on catching up faded out. A central question from a policy viewpoint is whether this fading out indicates a reduction of the adjustment...

Many theoretical analyses of the sources of economic growth focus on knowledge spillovers and scale economies to explain growth endogenously. The contribution of this paper is to shed some light on these arguments by an empirical investigation based on a production function framework. Sectoral...

"Despite the currently improving economic forecasts, the present labour market situation in Germany does not look too good. Especially the high and further increasing unemployment in eastern Germany is a key problem for current economic policy. Rigidities on the labour market, which manifest...

Firms may face financing constraints as a result of rational behaviour of potential lenders due to asymmetric information. In this article, a theoretical model of employment adjustment is developed to derive hypotheses on the short-run impact of financing constraints on employment at the firm...

This paper analyzes the role of labor market institutions for youth unemployment, as contrasted to total unemployment. The empirical results are basically consistent with an insider view of labor market institutions. Labor market institutions tend to protect (older) employees but might harm...

The ifo firm panel includes a large set of data for West German manufacturing firms from 1980-92 which permits a detailed analysis of firm behaviour. In this paper, estimates of the impact and the determinants of innovation behaviour are presented. The empirical results reveal that innovative...

Despite rapid economic integration and massive help from the Federal Government East German productivity catching up faded out in the nineties. This paper presents panel-data estimates of the productivity adjustment based on a production function framework and a stylized adjustment model of the...

The macroeconomic development in West Germany in the aftermath of unification was characterized by a boom period in 1990/1991, a deep recession in 1992/1993 and a slow recovery since then. In East Germany, in contrast, unification induced a breakdown of production and employment followed by a...

Unification fundamentally changed the terms of quantitative macroeconomic analysis for Germany. Two main areas concerned are data availability for the eastern part of Germany and structural changes within the behavioural equations after unification. Our paper presents results from the estimation...

The paper deals with causes and consequences of constraints on the adjustment of employment. First, a model of a delayed adjustment of employment and capital is worked out. This model is augmented with linear constraints on the adjustment speed of labour supply and demand. The aggregate model is...