During the last years more and more discussions came up about the contribution of technology-oriented and technology-intensive industries for employment and economic development. One reason for some of the contradictory evaluations of technology-intensive industries can be attributed to...

We present a sticky-price model incorporating heterogeneous firms and systematic firm-level productivity trends. Aggregating the model in closed form, we show that it delivers radically different predictions for the optimal inflation rate than canonical sticky price models featuring homogenous...

Thirty years after the seminal work of Modigliani and Miller and countless articles the capital structure puzzle is for the most part unsolved. Especially, in this field of research there is a considerable lack of empirical evidence. Using firm level data from seven European countries, this...

Ownership structures are an important element of the theory explaining corporate governance. This study presents detailed descriptive evidence on the ownership structures of German manufacturing firms. It addresses several shortcomings of the previous German empirical literature: First, we study...

In this paper it is tested which of the various alternative approaches for constructing knowledge spillover pools suggested in existing literature measures the extent to which a firm can costlessly receive external knowlegde best. Since knowledge spillovers are unmeasurable, a 'goodness of fit'...