Using the approach suggested by Gabaix (Econometrica 2011) this paper demonstrates that idiosyncratic shocks in the largest firms are important for an understanding of aggregate volatility in German manufacturing industries. The implications of this finding for theoretical and empirical research...

This study uses newly available representative data from German business services firms and a continuous treatment approach based on the generalized propensity score to test for a causal effect of R&D activities (measured by the share of engineers and natural scientists in all employees) on the...

This note uses a tailor-made new data set to investigate for the first time the link between the quality of a firm’s exports and the distance to destination countries for Germany. To anticipate the most important result, it is shown that the quality of exported goods and the distance to...

A stylized fact from the emerging literature on the micro-econometrics of international trade and a central implication of the heterogeneous firm models from the new new trade theory is that exporters are more productive than non-exporters. However, many firms from the lower end of the...

A stylized fact from the emerging literature on the micro-econometrics of international trade and a central implication of the heterogeneous firm models from the new new trade theory is that exporters are more productive than non-exporters. However, many firms from the lower end of the...

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

Business managers are well aware of the fact that credit constraints can hamper or even prevent exporting. Economists only recently started to incorporate these arguments in theoretical models of heterogeneous firms and to test the implications of these models econometrically with firm-level...

This is the first study of the link between internationalization and firm survival during the 2008/2009 crisis in Germany, a country which was hit relatively lightly compared to other countries. Moreover, it is the first study which looks at the role of importing, exporting and FDI...

Die hier vorgestellten Projektergebnisse wurden im Rahmen des Projekts EDaWaX (European Data Watch Extended, www.edawax.de) erarbeitet. EDaWaX wird von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (www.dfg.de) gefördert. Institutionell beteiligt sind an diesem Projekt der Rat für Sozial- und...