Researchers disagree about the relevance of the so called QWERTY-phenomenon which simply means to get stuck in a bad equilibrium. There exists two contrary parties. One side says that the major influence for market success comes from greater quality. In consequence an inferior market player...

Should agricultural development programs target women in order to increase productivity? This paper reviews the extensive literature on men's and women's relative productivity in agriculture, most of which concludes that controlling for access to inputs, plot and farmer characateristics, there...

Off-grid solar electric power is a promising technology for remote regions in rural Africa where expansion of the electricity grids is prohibitively expensive. Using household data from a target region of an off-grid solar promotion program in Burkina Faso, this paper explores the role of...

This paper studies the causal relations between regional employment growth in Knowledge- Intensive Business Services (KIBS) and overall regional employment growth using German labour-market data for the period 1999-2012. Adopting a recently developed technique, we are able to estimate a...

This paper provides evidence that the effect of agglomeration externalities on survival is moderated by the start-up's innovative behavior. It is shown that localization externalities are prevalent particularly in non-high-tech environments and unfold a positive influence on survival for less...

We present empirical evidence suggesting that technological progress in the digital age will be biased not only with respect to skills acquired through education but also with respect to noncognitive skills (personality). We measure the direction of technological change by estimated future...

In diesem aktuellen IfM Working Paper werden Handlungsempfehlungen zur Lösung der Problematik einer Neupositionierung der deutschen Funkfachhändler gegeben. Die Basis dieser Empfehlungen stellen die Ergebnisse von Leitfadeninterviews dar, die mit Experten dieser KMU-Branche geführt worden sind.

This paper investigates the impact of energy policies on the export performance of firms. There has been a long policy debate on potentially negative impacts of cost-increasing energy policies on international competitiveness. We use firm-level data from three countries with similar industry...

A growing literature investigates how firms' innovation input reacts to changes in the business cycle. However, so far there is no evidence whether there is cyclicality in the effects of innovation on firm performance as well. In this paper, we investigate the employment effects of innovations...

The shift of employment from lower to higher productive firms is an important driver for structural change and industry dynamics. We investigate this reallocation in terms of employment gains and losses from innovation. New employment created by product innovation may be offset by employment...