Since the late 1990s, the European higher education system has had to face deep structural changes. With the public authorities seeking to create an environment of quasi-markets in the higher education sector, the increased competition induced by recent reforms has pushed all publicly financed...

This paper makes three contributions. (1) It summarizes in tabular form a recent literature made of 36 micro-econometric studies for 16 different countries on the relationship between export destination and firm performance. (2) It reports estimates of the productivity premium of German firms...

Reliable information on the characteristics of exporting and non-exporting firms is important to guide theorists and policy makers in an evidence based way. This holds true especially for Germany, a leading actor on the world markets for goods and services. This paper makes three contributions...

In this study, we investigate the nexus between career risk aversion and unemployment duration based on German survey data (GSOEP). Using a direct measurement of career risk aversion, we do not find a statistically significant linear effect from risk aversion on unemployment duration. However,...

This paper investigates four cohorts of firms from German manufacturing industries that started to export in the years between 1998 and 2002 and follows them over the five years after the start. Export starters are a rare species and they are small on average compared to incumbent exporters....

I use a question about works council relations from the 2006 wave of the IAB Establishment panel to analyze the heterogeneous effects of works councils on productivity, wages, and profits. The results indicate that the effects differ significantly between works council relationship types in a...

A large and growing number of micro-econometric studies show that exporting firms are more productive than firms that sell their products on the home market only. This so-called exporter productivity premium qualifies as a stylized fact. Only recently researchers started to look at the role of...

This paper documents the relationship between foreign ownership and firm survival for enterprises in Germany using unique tailor-made new representative data that merge information from surveys performed by the Statistical Offices, from administrative data collected by the Tax Authorities and...

Information on the capital stock employed in a firm is missing in data sets from official statistics in Germany. This paper presents a method to estimate the capital stock of manufacturing enterprises that are covered by the cost structure survey from German official statistics. It uses data...

An emerging literature on international activities of heterogeneous firms documents that exporting firms are more productive than firms that only sell on the national market. This positive exporter productivity premium shows up in a large number of empirical studies after controlling for...