Firms in developed countries face increasing shortages of young workers. This paper studies the importance of young workers, particularly vocational trainees, for firm technology investments. Leveraging exogenous variation in trainee supply caused by an education reform in Germany in 2001, I...

Our paper contributes to the discussion about Europe's digital sovereignty. We analyze the relationship between firm performance and the diversification of sourcing countries for imported ICT goods. The analysis is based on administrative data for 3888 German manufacturing firms that imported...

This paper investigates a unique policy designed to maintain employment during the privatization of East German firms after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The policy required new owners of the firms to commit to employment targets, with penalties for non-compliance. Using a dynamic model, we...

This paper investigates the evolution of aggregate productivity and markups among French manufacturing firms between 1994 and 2016, by focusing on the role of reallocation with respect to both aggregate measures. Firm-level productivity and markups are estimated based on a gross output translog...

The literature on within-firm organizational change and productivity suggests that firms can make more efficient use of certain technologies if complementary forms of organization are adopted. This issue may be of even greater importance for the case of greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement...

This paper exploits the unique institutional features of South Africa to estimate the impact of provincial public spending on health, education and transport on firm productivity. Our identification strategy is based on within industry-province differences between firms of the effects of public...

The Flemish government launched its Spearhead Cluster (SHC) policy in 2017. The aim is to boost strategic sectors by setting up cluster initiatives which coordinate collaborative R&D initiatives. In this paper, we analyze whether becoming a member of such a cluster initiative has an impact on...

Production functions provide a mapping from the firms' input quantity and productivity to output quantity. This mapping only generates unbiased estimates if input and output quality variation within and between observation units is accounted for. I review and classify state-of-the-art methods to...

This paper explores whether investments in information and communication technologies (ICT) and firm?sponsored training programmes are complementary. Three approaches are applied to panel data from German service companies for the time period 1994?98. Results for a system of interrelated factor...

Since the German re?unification in 1990, Eastern Germany is a transition economy. After a phase of catching up of productivity with respect to Western Germany from 1991 to 1996, the growth rates in the producing sector have dropped below the Western German ones since 1997. This study...