Industrial and economic espionage - rival companies or intelligence services gaining unauthorised access to business information - is seen by businesses as a growing threat. For the first time, representative data from the 2023 IAB Establishment Panel are now available on this topic for Germany....

Power law distributions are ubiquitous in socioeconomic contexts. While their general properties are well understood, it is often less clear why they regularly appear in empirical data. What are the generative mechanisms leading to power laws, how do they arise in the real world? This paper aims...

This paper examines the impact of automation investments on employment dynamics and workforce composition using administrative data from Portugal. I exploit the lumpiness of automation imports in a difference-in-differences event study design. My results show that automation creates jobs in...

This Brief studies the establishment size distribution in the European Union countries. A well-established literature has established that an abundance of small establishments among lower-income countries is evidence of the misallocation of inputs. To investigate this phenomenon, this Brief...

This paper documents new facts on corporate taxation and the revenue potential of corporate minimum taxes, leveraging firm-level tax returns from 16 countries. First, effective tax rates follow a humped-shaped pattern with firm size: small firms benefit from reduced rates, while large firms take...

This paper examines the role of vocational education and training (VET) in innovation by comparing the VET workforce's participation in innovation with that of university graduates, such as scientists and engineers. Using individual-level data from the German manufacturing sector, we distinguish...

This study examines the interplay of co-determination law and board gender quotas using novel board-director panel data for Norway. We present descriptive evidence suggesting that boards with employee representatives on boards of directors were more gender diverse before the gender quota....

One of the most misunderstood components of valuing a small closely-held business is how to address the impact of small size. Most closely-held enterprises are relatively small in size, with market values less than $1million. Many small mom and pop operations, or single owner-operator family...

We revisit the size-volatility relationship in firm growth using administrative data on French manufacturing firms. Departing from the log-log linear decay commonly reported by other studies, we find a two-regime pattern: volatility declines steeply with size for small firms, but flattens for...

Poorer countries (and poorer states within India) have a larger share of manufacturing employment in small plants. This paper presents empirical evidence and a theoretical model to show that this relationship is driven by greater demand for lower quality goods in poorer regions, which can be...

We assess the reliability of measured farm sizes (ownership holdings) in the Living Standard Measurement Study – Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) in Ethiopia and Malawi based on three survey rounds (2012, 2014, 2016) in Ethiopia and four rounds (2010, 2013, 2016, 2019) in Malawi....

Power law distributions are ubiquitous in socioeconomic contexts. While their general properties are well understood, it is often less clear why they regularly appear in empirical data. What are the generative mechanisms leading to power laws, how do they arise in the real world? This paper aims...

This paper examines the individual innovation contributions of the vocational education and training (VET) workforce compared to university graduates such as scientists and engineers. For this purpose, individual-level data from the German manufacturing sector are used, distinguishing between...

This paper uses a rich set of geo-coded administrative and remotely sensed data on more than 1 million agricultural land transactions in Ukraine to explore how informality, size, and recent land reforms affect land prices. Three main findings are highlighted. First, absence of registered rights...

If old firms are on average much larger than young firms, does it mean that firms get better with age? Using Danish administrative data on firms aged 0-65, we study the relationship between size and age. In the cross-section, average size increases with age. However, exploiting the panel...

Using an extensive sample of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings, we reexamine the corporate social responsibility (CSR) factor premium in the developed equity markets between 2007 and 2019 and show that its extent is contingent upon size effects. Consistent with the novel market...

This paper studies how a forward-looking decision maker experiments on unknown alternatives of correlated utilities. The utilities are modeled by a Brownian motion such that similar alternatives yield similar utilities. Experimentation trades off between the continuation value of exploration and...