Although there exists a vast literature on convergence and divergence of income levels across countries or regions at the aggregate level, there is only little work on convergence and/or diver- gence processes of productivity and wage levels at the more disaggregated industrial level. These are...

Feenstra and Ma (2008) develop a monopolistic competition model where firms choose their optimal product scope by balancing the profits from a new variety against the costs of 'cannibalizing' sales of existing varieties. While more productive firms always have a higher market share, there is no...

This paper investigates the determinants of inter-firm cooperation in research and development (R&D). We analyze the impact of structural and firm specific characteristics, market performance, access to resources and managerial techniques on different types of inter firm R&D cooperation. Based...

Competitive tendering of local bus services in Germany has received increased attention. Employing Seemingly Unrelated Regression analyses, we observe that prices have regionally varying determinants; for example, while prices throughout most of the federal state of Hesse increase over time,...

This paper examines the effects of real estate transfer taxes (RETT) on property prices using a rich micro dataset of roughly 17 million German properties for the period from 2005 to 2019. We exploit a 2006 constitutional reform that allows states to set their own RETT rates, leading to frequent...

Literature suggests that location should matter for R&D activities. However, attempts to empirically detect differences in innovation activity between regions have so far been rather unsuccessful. Using a unique data set which contains comparable information about manufacturing enterprises in...

The sensitivity of innovation activities with respect to the business cycle is often assumed to be small. In this paper the hypothesis on cyclical dependence of innovation activities is tested for firms in the German manufacturing, and additionally for SMEs. To this end firms' innovation...

Using firm level data this study investigates the relation between export activity and firm’s profitability. The paper shows that, contrary to other performance indicators such as productivity, exporting activity is not systematically associated to higher firm’s profitability. This is shown...

This paper investigates the effects of Greece's European Union (EU) accession and European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) entry, as well as R&D intensity and industry concentration on job creation and job destruction in the Greek manufacturing sector. The study is based on firm-level economic...

This paper examined the causal relationship between the capital market and the performance of the industrial sector in Nigeria from 1985 to 2015. The paper derived its theoretical basis from the finance-led growth hypothesis and the endogenous growth theory. For empirical analysis, the...