The telecommunications in the 1990s witnessed an enormous worldwide round of Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A). This paper examines the innovation determinants of M&A activity and the consequences of M&A transactions on the technological potential and the innovation performance. We examine the...

To quickly adapt to technological change and developments, and thus remain competitive, firms increasingly resort to the use of external technology. This paper investigates whether and to what extent the acquisition of external disembodied technology affects the efficiency and productivity in...

This paper explores the relationship between risk attitude and asset diversification in household portfolios. We first examine the impact of manifested risk aversion on the total number of distinct assets held in a portfolio (naive diversification). The second part of the paper focuses on a more...

Our study provides evidence for firms' evaluation of location quality. We use a 2004 survey of 6,000 East German firms that contained questions on the importance and assessment of 15 different location factors ranging from closeness to customers and suppliers, transport infrastructure, and...

Using the 2007 Mannheim innovation survey, we investigate whether family firms are more financially constrained than other firms and how this affects both innovation input as well as innovation outcomes such as market and firm novelties or process innovations. Based on the CDM framework,...

Using micro-level panel data of about 35,000 firms from the German Cost Structure Census, we analyze the differences of technical efficiency across industries. Technical efficiency is estimated by firms? fixed effects. One striking result is that the distribution of technical efficiency across...

Siegel (1995) has developed a technique with which the systematic risk of a security (beta) can be estimated without recourse to historical capital market data. Instead, beta is estimated implicitly from the current market prices of exchange options that enable the exchange of a security against...

This paper investigates the factors that explain the level and dynamics of manufacturing firm productive efficiency. In our empirical analysis, we use a unique sample of about 39,000 firms in 256 industries from the German Cost Structure Census over the years 1992-2005. We estimate the...

This paper studies the impact of credit rating agency (CRA) announcements on the value of the Euro and the yields of French, Italian, German and Spanish long-term sovereign bonds during the culmination of the Eurozone debt crisis in 2011-2012. The employed GARCH models show that CRA downgrade...

We examine whether monetary transmission during the financial and sovereign debt crisis was dominated by the cost channel or by the demand-side channel effect. We use two approaches to track down the potential passthrough of changes in the monetary policy rate to those in consumer prices. First,...