Virtually all theories of economic growth predict a positive relationship between population size and productivity. In this paper I study a particular historical episode to provide direct evidence for the empirical relevance of such scale effects. In the aftermath of the Second World War about...

This empirical paper documents the relationship between composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance (productivity and profitability) for a large representative sample of enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany. We use unique newly...

Who should control the firm? What should be the firm's objective function? If contracts are incomplete, then the group of input providers that most needs their interests protected should be allocated control rights to the firm. Existing theories argue that the suppliers of capital are most in...

This paper examines the decision to enter the export market by German firms. While exports have played an important role in recent German business cycle movements, little is known about the export supply response of German firms. This paper presents a dynamic model of the export decision by a...

Universal banking is an alternative mechanism to a stock market for risk-sharing, for providing information for guiding investment, and for contesting corporate governance. In Germany, where the stock market has historically been small, banks hold equity stakes in firms and have proxy voting...

This paper examines executive turnover -- both for management and supervisory boards - - and its relation to firm performance in the largest companies in Germany in the 1980s. The management board turns over slowly -- at a rate of 10% per year -- implying that top executives in Germany have...