This empirical research note documents the relationship between composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance with respect to innovative activities (outlays and employment in research and development (R&D)) for a large representative sample of...

In Germany, for the reporting year 2009 transaction-level data on exports and imports of goods have been aggregated at the level of the exporting or importing firm for the first time. In these data the number of goods exported and imported and the number of countries exported to and imported...

Export is dominated by enterprises that trade more than one good with customers in more than one destination country. Germany, one of the leading actors on the world market for goods, is a case in point. Theoretical models of multiple-product, multipledestination exporters that can guide...

This study uses newly available enterprise level data for firms from manufacturing industries in Germany to test for the link between credit constraints, measured by a credit rating score from the leading credit rating agency Creditreform, and exports. In line with hypotheses from theoretical...

This paper contributes to the literature by comparing the productivity distribution for firms with various numbers of goods traded and various numbers of countries traded with from Germany, one of the leading actors on the world market for goods. It applies a non-parametric test for first-order...

Using quantile regression and a rich cross section data set for German manufacturing plants this paper documents that the impact of plant characteristics on export activities varies along the conditional size distribution of the export/sales ratio.

Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality longitudinal data at the enterprise level for Germany, this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between exports and profitability. It documents that the positive profitability differential of...

Using quantile regressions and a rich cross section data set for German manufacturing plants, this paper reports that the impact of works councils on labor productivity varies along the conditional distribution of value added per employee. It emerges that the positive and statistically...

We use newly available representative panel data for manufacturing enterprises in West and East Germany to investigate the link between production-related subsidies and exports. We document that only a small fraction of enterprises is subsidized, and that exports and subsidies are positively...

Using unique new data and a recently introduced non-linear decomposition technique this paper shows that the huge difference in the propensity to export between West and East German plants is to a large part due to differences in firm size and human capital intensity.