Virtually all empirical firm-level studies on the demand for labor do not include labor cost in the econometric specification. This is due to the fact that business and innovation survey data usually lack information on labor cost. This paper shows how reliable skill-specific and firm-specific...

In this paper we study political-economy determinants of the differentiation of environmental taxes between sectors. Using a common-agency model, we provide predictions on tax differentiation which are then tested using data from the German Ecological Tax Reform. As the reform is revenue neutral...

Company taxes and taxes on highly skilled labour both influence the attractiveness of a particular region as a location for investment. We measure the effective tax burden on capital investment and on highly qualified labour in 33 locations across Europe and the United States. We then correlate...

Recent studies have documented extensive heterogeneity in firm performance within countries, and innovation has been found as an important determinant. This paper addresses the issue of innovation firm performance across countries. A growing number of national firm level studies on the...

This paper analyses the link between educational attainment and unemployment risk in a French-German comparison, based on a discrete time competing risks hazard rate model applied to comparable microdata sets. The unemployment risk is broken down into the risk of entering unemployment and the...

This paper compares the work attachment of French and German women after childbirth. Both fertility and employment of mothers are higher in France than in Germany. Since the sample of mothers deciding on employment after a child is born might not be representative for all women, we take account...

The huge difference in the level and variance of student performance in the 2000 PISA study between Finland and Germany motivates this paper. It analyses why Finnish students performed so much better by estimating educational production functions for both countries. The difference in the reading...

Exploiting the unique economic situation after German unification, I investigate how exit decisions deviate between new firms in a transition and a comparatively stable market environment. Two competing exit mechanisms are considered: entrepreneurial self-selection via voluntary liquidation and...

This paper presents and compares several time-series models for returns of broadbased stock indices. These models nest a nonlinear asymmetric GARCH (NGARCH) model as a special case. Some of these models are empirically motivated ad-hoc specifications others are derived from a representative...

This paper analyses the relationship between education, gender and earnings in France and Germany. The model chosen here enables to estimate the impact of education not only on the expected earnings level but also on their dispersion, taking gender-specific sample selectivity into account. The...