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...

Studies of spatial policy interdependence in (local) public policies usually concentrate on the relations between jurisdictions within a single analysed region, and disregard possible extra-regional effects. This paper evaluates the validity of such restriction by studying German local...

Cartel detection is usually viewed as a key task of either competition authorities or compliance officials in firms with an elevated risk of cartelization. We argue that customers of hard core cartels can have both incentives and possibilities to detect such agreements on their own initiative...

This paper exploits the unique institutional features of South Africa to estimate the impact of provincial public spending on health, education and transport on firm productivity. Our identification strategy is based on within industry-province differences between firms of the effects of public...

This paper examines whether information technology (IT) and decentralized work organization are complementary only for large firms or also for smaller firms. Empirical evidence, which suggests complementarity between IT and decentralization, is mainly based on large firms. Using data from a...

The literature on within-firm organizational change and productivity suggests that firms can make more efficient use of certain technologies if complementary forms of organization are adopted. This issue may be of even greater importance for the case of greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement...

I study the causal effect of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) on the productivity of German manufacturing firms. Using administrative firm-level data, I estimate robust production functions for narrowly defined industries. This approach allows for an endogenous dynamic...

Missing values are a major problem in all econometric applications based on survey data. A standard approach assumes data are missing-at-random and uses imputation methods, or even listwise deletion. This approach is justified if item non-response does not depend on the potentially missing...

We investigate the effect of international differences in corporate taxation on the realization of productivity gains in M&A deals. We argue that tax differentials distort the efficient allocation of productive factors following an M&A and thus mitigate the resulting productivity improvement....

This paper investigates the impact of modern information and communication technologies on the demand for heterogeneous labor. It starts with an interrelated factor demand system. The "desired" level of employment, which is needed in such models, is derived from a generalized Leontief cost...