Using data from the 1997 and 2002 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel and from official statistics, the present paper studies whether natives are less supportive of state help for the unemployed in regions where the share of foreigners among the unemployed is high. The effect of immigration...

The recent financial crisis has put the German banking sector under enormous pressure. Besides the macroeconomic drivers like, for example, the expansionary monetary policy in major countries, insufficient risk management and weak corporate governance systems have been identified as the main...

Knowledge and technological change are often assumed to be the driving forces for long run economic growth. Regions with a higher level of knowledge compared to other regions exhibit a higher per-capita income on average. Agglomeration effects can lead to a steady increase of income and widen...

Establishing a new firm is a complex process which comprises many tasks. A common assumption in the theoretical literature on entrepreneurship is therefore that interdisciplinarity is important for successfully running a new firm. Empirically it is still an open question whether...

Economic theory suggests that financing constraints may occur due to capital market imperfections. These particularly affect investments in innovation projects as such projects are typically characterized by a high degree of uncertainty, complexity and specificity. Financing innovation...

The law on labour market reforms has severely limited the maximum benefit period for the elderly; with cuts of up to 14 months, depending on the age group. Our paper examines this natural experiment and shows that for the age groups in question, the transition rates from employment to...

This paper analyses the impact of business process outsourcing (BPO) on firm productivity based on a comprehensive German firm-level panel data set covering manufacturing and service industries. The growing importance of service inputs into the production process is undisputed. Firms...

This article considers cognitive distance and combined competence as predictors of success in co-operative Research and Development (R&D) projects of firms. The concepts of cognitive distance and combined competence are operationalised based upon a dedicated survey, answered by matched pairs of...

During the last two decades many countries have reformed their welfare systems with the aim of shifting labor market policies from passive benefit receipt towards increased job search and work requirements. As part of this shift benefit sanctions are increasingly being used in the activation...

The internationalisation of corporate R&D is an opportunity for firms to reach local knowledge and expertise which is distributed globally. Firms' innovation activities which are carried out abroad comprise either the localization of uniform products to local needs with locally available...