The Mannheim Enterprise Panel (Mannheimer Unternehmenspanel – MUP) of the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) is the most comprehensive micro database of companies in Germany outside the official business register (which is not accessible to the public). The MUP is based on the firm...

This article investigates how a firm's financial strength affcts its dynamic decision to invest in R&D. We estimate a dynamic model of R&D choice using data for German firms in high-tech manufacturing industries. The model incorporates a measure of the firm's financial strength, derived from its...

This empirical analysis deals with the determinants of growth and the explanation of variations in the growth between innovative and non-innovative start-ups. Based on theoretical models explaining the growth of firms, hypotheses on potential determinants are formulated. The regression results...

Productivity growth has been slow in many continental European countries over the last few decades, especially in comparison with the United States. It has been argued that lack of product market competition and poor corporate governance are two of the main reasons for this phenomenon. However,...

We analyze the performance of firms in the German business-related services sector. A quarterly business survey provides the panel data base of our study. Firm performance is measured by the survey respondents' ordinal indication of their changes in total sales. We use a firstorder Markov chain...

For firms acting in technological niches the expansion into foreign markets can be a way to increase sales and to thus to recover initial sunk costs over a shorter time frame. Our research, based on survey data for nearly 600 British and German high-tech start-ups, examines whether...

This paper makes an empirical contribution to confirm the stylized fact that the performance of firms deteoriates in the years before exit. For this reason we evaluate whether market exits differ significantly in their employment development in the years before market drop-out compared to...

This paper analyzes the medium-term growth performance of firms that exclusively received start-up assistance from programs administered by the Deutsche Ausgleichsbank (DtA), a state owned bank, within two years after startup. I apply a parametric selection approach that controls for two...

The contribution of different-sized businesses to job creation continues to attract policymakers’ attention, however, it has recently been recognized that conclusions about size were confounded with the effect of age. We probe the role of size, controlling for age, by comparing the cohorts of...