This paper contributes to the literature by documenting for the first time the contribution of adding (and dropping) goods and destination countries to the sharp increase in exports of goods in the German economy as a whole during the Great Export Recovery in 2009/2010. The empirical...

This paper aims at examining the role played by inward Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) in affecting the exit probabilities of German manufacturing firms in the precrisis year 2007. We introduce two main novelties: in the first place, we include the FDI variable, dividing it between types of...

Only recently have the aspects of pollution and environmental protection entered into the empirical literature about international firm activities. The present paper is the first firmlevel study on the link between foreign ownership and environmental protection in Germany. We find that, ceteris...

We propose a new three-step model-selection framework for size distributions in empirical data. It generalizes a recent frequentist plausibility-of-fit analysis (Step 1) and combines it with a relative ranking based on the Bayesian Akaike Information Criterion (Step 2). We enhance these...

Empirical studies analyzing the determinants of U.S. presidential popularity have delivered quite inconclusive results concerning the role of economic variables by assuming linear relationships. We employ penalized spline smoothing in the context of semi-parametric additive mixed models and...

Even after four decades of research it remains unclear, whether presidential popularity depends on the state of the economy. While about half of all studies for the United States find a significant effect of unemployment and inflation on presidential popularity, the others do not. Additional...

This paper deploys a dynamic extension of the Melitz (2003) model to generate predictions on export market exit and firm survival in a setting where firms endogenously make exit decisions. The central driver of the model dynamics is the inclusion of exogenous economy wide technological progress....

Individual preferences with respect to risk taking play an important role in financial economic behaviour and, hence, in financial markets. Using German microdata, we argue that individual religiosity is a determinant of household willingness to take risks, since it shapes relevant individual...

This paper investigates social preferences towards unemployment and inflation in the United States. Estimating a popularity function with monthly data for the recent Obama administration, we find that U.S. voters react strongly to both unemployment and inflation. However, reducing unemployment...