In this paper, we propose a general model for various scheduling problems that occur in container terminal logistics. The scheduling model consists of the assignment of jobs to resources and the temporal arrangement of the jobs subject to precedence constraints and sequence-dependent setup...

We exploit homogeneous firm level data of manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors to study the impact of firing restrictions on job flow dynamics across 14 European countries. We find that more stringent firing laws dampen the response of job destruction to the cycle, thus making job...

Small firms often do not change their number of employees from year to year. This paper investigates the role of adjustment costs and indivisibility of labor in the employment stickiness of manufacturing firms with less than 75 employees. When small firms have to adjust employment in units of at...

In this article, we estimate the structure of costs of hiring, terminating, and retiring employees in France. We use a representative panel data set of French establishments that contains direct measures of these various costs as well as measures of entries and exits for the years 1992 and 1996....

Often the high level of unemployment in Germany is explained by a lack of flexibility, over-regulation in the labour market and disincentives of the social security system. However, these institutional effects are difficult to test by means of data from only one country. Cross-country...

While the volatility of job creations has been studied extensively, the survival chances of new jobs are less researched. The question when and how to expand a firm is of importance, both from the firm’s and from a macro perspective. Adjustment cost theories and arguments about option values...

The objective of this article is to study the behavior of German HR managers in the wake of the global crisis. Some criticize them as humble hangmen who simply execute the orders of top management—killing jobs and laying off people. Others praise them as intelligent problem solvers who did an...

We study whether older workers are costly to firms. Our estimation equations are derived from a variant of the decomposition methods frequently used for measuring micro-level sources of industry productivity growth. By using comprehensive linked employeremployee data from the Finnish business...

The aim of this study is to shed light on the factors which determine the post-entry performance of new firms. It is often argued that new firms are the driving force of structural changes and sometimes they are even characterized as an engine of economic growth. Nevertheless, the empirical...

It is often claimed that small and young firms account for a disproportionately large share of net employment growth. We conduct a meta analysis of the empirical evidence regarding whether net employment growth rather is generated by a few rapidly growing firms - so-called Gazelles - that are...