Avoiding labor shortages for skilled employees is one of the major challenges for highly competitive firms acting in tight labor markets. The ability to avoid labor shortages on the company level, for example measured by the share of vacant jobs, is distributed very unevenly and cannot in...

In a recent paper Lazear (2004) proposed the so called skill-weights view of firm-specific human capital. According to his theory all single skills are general but each firm may require a different combination of these single skills. The purpose of our paper is to test Lazear's model using a...

Little is currently known about the effects of skill composition on academic entrepreneurship. Therefore, in this paper, following Lazear’s (2005) jack-of-all-trades approach, we study how the composition of a scientist’s skills affects his or her intention to become an entrepreneur....

This paper explores, based on the varieties-of-capitalism approach, configurations of key human resource management practices that explain radical innovation in subsidiaries. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis is conducted with data for 69 subsidiaries of US-based MNEs in Germany,...

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...

This paper investigates R&D partnerships among companies in the German manufacturing industry. Companies work together in R&D partnerships and put forward joint research efforts, but do not give up their economic independence. The question is why companies engage in R&D partnerships and under...