In Germany, the productivity of professional services, a sector dominated by micro and small firms, declined by 40 percent between 1995 and 2014. This productivity decline also holds true for professional services in other European countries. Using a German firm-level dataset of 700,000 observations between 2003 and 2017, we analyze this largely uncovered phenomenon among professional services, the ...
We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic, and of the governmentmandated measures to contain its spread, affect the self-employed – particularly women – in Germany. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about their situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that among the self-employed, who generally face ...
In the last decade, many parts of the world experienced severe increases in agricultural land prices. This price surge, however, did not take place evenly in space and time. To better understand the spatial and temporal behavior of land prices, we employ a price diffusion model that combines features of market integration models and spatial econometric models. An application of this model to farmland ...
A rich literature links knowledge inputs with innovative outputs. However, most of what is known is restricted to manufacturing. This paper analyzes whether the three aspects involving innovative activity - R&D; innovative output; and productivity - hold for knowledge intensive services. Combining the models of Crepon et al. (1998) and of Ackerberg et al. (2015), allows for causal interpretation of ...
Understanding whether laws shape or simply reflect citizens' attitudes is important but empirically difficult. We provide new evidence on this question by studying the relationship between legal same-sex relationship recognition policies (SSRRPs) and attitudes toward sexual minorities in Europe. Using data from the European Social Surveys covering 2002-2016 and exploiting variation in the timing of ...
Are there economies of scale to data in internet search? This paper is first to use real search engine query logs to empirically investigate how data drives the quality of internet search results. We find evidence that the quality of search results improve with more data on previous searches. Moreover, our results indicate that the type of data matters as well: personalized information is particularly ...
