Although there exists a vast literature on convergence and divergence of income levels across countries or regions at the aggregate level, there is only little work on convergence and/or diver- gence processes of productivity and wage levels at the more disaggregated industrial level. These are...

Feenstra and Ma (2008) develop a monopolistic competition model where firms choose their optimal product scope by balancing the profits from a new variety against the costs of 'cannibalizing' sales of existing varieties. While more productive firms always have a higher market share, there is no...

The sensitivity of innovation activities with respect to the business cycle is often assumed to be small. In this paper the hypothesis on cyclical dependence of innovation activities is tested for firms in the German manufacturing, and additionally for SMEs. To this end firms' innovation...

This paper investigates the effect of a housing company's size on the outcome of energetic refurbishment. We argue that economies of scale, economies of scope and effects of learning have an impact on the production of energy-efficient housing services. To test our hypothesis, we use unique data...

Competitive tendering of local bus services in Germany has received increased attention. Employing Seemingly Unrelated Regression analyses, we observe that prices have regionally varying determinants; for example, while prices throughout most of the federal state of Hesse increase over time,...

Literature suggests that location should matter for R&D activities. However, attempts to empirically detect differences in innovation activity between regions have so far been rather unsuccessful. Using a unique data set which contains comparable information about manufacturing enterprises in...

In this article, we examine why it is difficult to induce firms to form Research Joint Ventures (RJVs). We examine various incentives and disincentives for RJV formation by estimating an endogeneous switching model using data from the US National Cooperative Research Act. The empirical findings...

Theoretical models of endogenous growth identify capital accumulation and returns as a potential stimulus to economic growth. Existing empirical studies, however, are based on a limited notion of these returns, which follows from the simple production function framework used for estimation. The...