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DIW Discussion Papers 807 / 2008
This paper explores the relationship between risk attitude and asset diversification in household portfolios. We first examine the impact of manifested risk aversion on the total number of distinct assets held in a portfolio (naive diversification). The second part of the paper focuses on a more sophisticated strategy of diversification and asks whether financial theory is compatible with observed ...
2008| Nataliya Barasinska, Dorothea Schäfer, Andreas Stephan
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DIW Discussion Papers 804 / 2008
This paper has two goals. First, it analyzes the extent to which the innovativeness of spin-offs, either born from a research facility or from another company, is influenced by locational conditions. Second, it provides evidence on how important local cooperation links are in comparison to nonlocal ones. Using a sample of approximately 1,500 East German firms from knowledge-intensive sectors, we estimate ...
2008| Anna Lejpras, Andreas Stephan
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DIW Discussion Papers 801 / 2008
Trade theory and economic geography suggest that the removal of trade barriers is likely to bring about more economic specialisation and potentially more diverse development paths between countries and regions. Thus, the deepening and extending European integration should be accompanied by an increasing regional specialisation. In contrast, our results for the period from 1995 to 2004 show considerably ...
2008| Kurt Geppert, Martin Gornig, Anna Lejpras
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DIW Discussion Papers 784 / 2008
This paper investigates the determinants of liability maturity choice in transition markets. We formulate a model of firm value maximization that describes managers' choice of optimal debt structure. The theoretical predictions are tested using a unique panel of 4,300 Ukrainian firms during the period 2000-2005. Our estimates confirm the importance of liquidity, signaling, maturity matching, and agency ...
2008| Andreas Stephan, Oleksandr Talavera, Andriy Tsapin
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DIW Discussion Papers 780 / 2008
This paper discusses the impact of a firm's technology portfolio on its market value. Two concepts are used to characterize a firm's portfolio: the number of technological fields and the degree of relatedness within the portfolio characterized by the amount of joint occurrences of patents in technological fields. Based on a theoretical framework using an expanded Tobin's q approach, it presents evidence ...
2008| Jens Schmidt-Ehmcke, Petra Zloczysti
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DIW Discussion Papers 775 / 2008
This paper investigates the factors that explain the level and dynamics of manufacturing firm productive efficiency. In our empirical analysis, we use a unique sample of about 39,000 firms in 256 industries from the German Cost Structure Census over the years 1992-2005. We estimate the efficiencies of the firms and relate them to firm-specific and environmental factors. We find that (1) about half ...
2008| Oleg Badunenko, Michael Fritsch, Andreas Stephan
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DIW Discussion Papers 740 / 2007
In this paper we used the procedures developed in the Kumar and Russell (2002) growth-accounting study to examine cross-country growth during the 1990's. Using a data set comprising developed, newly industrialized, developing and transitional economies, we decomposed the growth of output per worker into components attributable to technological catch-up, technological change and capital accumulation. ...
2007| Oleg Badunenko, Daniel J. Henderson, Valentin Zelenyuk
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DIW Discussion Papers 739 / 2007
This study compares two alternative approaches to estimate parameters in gravity equations. We compare the traditional OLS approach applied to the log-linear form of the gravity model with the Poisson Quasi Maximum Likelihood (PQML) estimation procedure applied to the non-linear multiplicative specification of the gravity model. We use the trade flows for all products, for all manufacturing products ...
2007| Boriss Siliverstovs, Dieter Schumacher
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DIW Discussion Papers 735 / 2007
This study suggests another explanation of the "missing globalization puzzle" typically observed in the empirical gravity models. In contrast to the previous research that focused on aggregated trade flows, we employ the trade flows in manufacturing products broken down by 25 three-digit ISIC Rev.2 categories. We estimate the distance coefficient using the log-linear specification of the standard as ...
2007| Boriss Siliverstovs, Dieter Schumacher
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DIW Discussion Papers 728 / 2007
The telecommunications in the 1990s witnessed an enormous worldwide round of Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A). This paper examines the innovation determinants of M&A activity and the consequences of M&A transactions on the technological potential and the innovation performance. We examine the telecommunications equipment industry over the period 1988-2002 using a newly constructed data set with firm-level ...
2007| Tseveen Gantumur, Andreas Stephan