In the early 1990's, the Argentine government promoted a framework for productivity-based negotiations between firms and unions at low levels of organization. The policy weakened the industry-wide collective bargaining system, which sets working conditions for all firms in an industry. This...

Die sich in Deutschland etablierende Tauschkultur schlägt sich bislang als Sharing Economy vorrangig im "Consumer-to-Consumer-(C2C)"-Bereich nieder. Konzepte des Teilens und Tauschens finden mittlerweile aber auch Einzug in die Industrie auf "Business-to-Business"-Ebene (B2B) und beziehen sich...

The bulk of Germany's research and development (R&D) activity is concentrated in densely populated areas, urban regions that account for 62 percent of the country's R&D workforce. The regions surrounding Stuttgart, Munich, and Braunschweig have by far the highest R&D intensity-that is, the share...

Forschung und Entwicklung (FuE) sind in Deutschland auf die Verdichtungsräume konzentriert, 62 Prozent des FuE-Personals sind dort tätig. Bei der FuE-Intensität - also dem Anteil der FuE-Beschäftigten an allen Erwerbstätigen - führen mit großem Abstand die Regionen Stuttgart, München und...

This paper investigates whether failure in innovation at the firm level can account for cross-country heterogeneity in manufacturing productivity growth. There is no strong evidence in the literature on the existence of such link. Our work, however, differs in a number of ways from much of the...

The availability of new internationally-harmonized innovation survey data collected from OECD countries has created some interesting opportunities for studying the following two key areas: (1) the determinants of innovation behavior at firm level, and (2) innovation as an important factor...

The objective of this study is to investigate the sensitivity of the estimated relationship between innovation and firm performance. In doing so, we rely on a knowledge production function approach and carry out comparisons in a number of respects. The sensitivity analysis is based on the...

This study analyses the impact of knowledge assets on productivity and technical efficiency in the EU, as well as their role in the process of knowledge transfer. The analysis covers the role of the institutional and regulatory environment in affecting productivity and technical efficiency and...

This paper addresses the relationship between the utilization of temporary agency workers by firms and their competitiveness measured by unit labor costs, using a rich, newly built, data set of German manufacturing enterprises. The analysis is conducted by applying different panel data models...

A growing proportion of employees are working under fixed-term contracts. This paper empirically analyzes whether this strategy actually improves firm productivity. To this end, a large dataset of German manufacturing firms and various panel data models are used in order to reveal the expected...