The literature on international trade and firm performance grows exponentially. This paper attempts to summarize what we learn from this literature to guide both future empirical and theoretical work in this area, and public debates and policy makers, in an evidence-based way. The focus is on...

Since the late 1990s, the European higher education system has had to face deep structural changes. With the public authorities seeking to create an environment of quasi-markets in the higher education sector, the increased competition induced by recent reforms has pushed all publicly financed...

Export-led growth has gained considerable prominence as a model for economic development since its use by East Asian newly industrializing countries. Thus, the question of how it can be used by other countries wishing to industrialize and under what circumstances it can lead to the take-off of...

Das Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre der Universität Lüneburg legt hiermit seinen fünften eigenständigen Forschungsbericht vor. Wir möchten mit unserem Bericht alle Interessenten an unserer wissenschaftlichen Arbeit in kompakter Form über die von uns bearbeiteten Forschungsthemen und...

We empirically study personal norms of sustainability, conceptualized according to the normactivation theory and operationalized under the notion of strong ecological-economic sustainability, for commercial cattle farmers in semi-arid rangelands of Namibia, a system that is subject to extensive...

I use a question about works council relations from the 2006 wave of the IAB Establishment panel to analyze the heterogeneous effects of works councils on productivity, wages, and profits. The results indicate that the effects differ significantly between works council relationship types in a...

A large and growing number of micro-econometric studies show that exporting firms are more productive than firms that sell their products on the home market only. This so-called exporter productivity premium qualifies as a stylized fact. Only recently researchers started to look at the role of...

This paper documents the relationship between foreign ownership and firm survival for enterprises in Germany using unique tailor-made new representative data that merge information from surveys performed by the Statistical Offices, from administrative data collected by the Tax Authorities and...

This paper summarizes in a non-technical way what we know from empirical studies based on firm-level data about the mutual links between international activities of firms and productivity. It is written with a view to inform policy makers in an evidencebased way. A special focus is on the...

Survey data is used to estimate the impact of physical attractiveness rated by the interviewer as well as by the respondent on employment probability and labor income of men and women. In addition to mean linear and non-linear effects on earnings, simultaneous quantile regressions are applied to...