Building on the notion of general and specific human capital proposed by Becker (1962), the paper highlights the importance of employee training practices undertaken in firms as an important tool for human resource and knowledge management and focuses on the role of works councils as a specific...

This paper analyzes whether firms conducting internal R&D and acquiring external high-tech equipment experience a complementarity effect. For German CIS data we conduct a complete set of indirect and direct complementarity tests refining the analysis by looking at various types of innovations...

The pure model of replicator dynamics though providing important insights in the evolution of markets has not found much of empirical support. This paper extends the model to the case of firms vertically integrated in value chains. We show that i) by taking value chains into account, the...

A growing number of studies identify a generalized slowdown in labor productivity growth. The very existence of the slowdown ignited a series of academic debates suggesting that secular stagnation or "mismeasurement" problems are at the root of the observed trends. We posit that the composition...

This study focuses on a well-known but yet elusive concept: (technological) lock-in. We summarize what is known about the nature of lock-in and offer a critical view on history- dependent processes based on recent contributions to the literature. We discuss if lock-ins are really inescapable,...

At least since Schumpeter published his work "The Theory of Economic Development" (1912), a wide body of literature has focused on the evolutionary process behind firm growth and survival. Recently a growing interest is devoted to the variable "location" as a critical factor, shaping firm...

Innovation is the major driver of economic growth and development. To analyze innovation processes the restriction of a framework suited to the analysis of innovation towards the industrial sphere of an economy is not sufficient because of the important co-evolutionary dimensions of innovation....

In this paper, we give an overview on recent developments in the research on national innovation systems (NIS). Essentially, we identify three development lines of the concept. These are policy-oriented studies that frequently combine the NIS approach with the terminology of corporate...