Thema Unternehmen

Common Ownership Patterns in the European Banking Sector – The Impact of the Financial Crisis

We provide a description of ownership patterns in the top 25 European banks for the period 2003–2015, where we especially focus on the global financial crisis. Investment managers, such as Blackrock, are dominant in terms of number of block holdings in different banks, maintaining fairly stable “common ownership” networks throughout our sample. However, the financial crisis led...

Broadband and Productivity: Structural Estimates for Germany

We study the impact of broadband availability on firms’ total factor productivity (TFP) using German firm-level data between 2010 and 2015. We adopt a control function approach to causally identify and separately estimate productivity for 46 two-digit manufacturing and service sectors. Over the sample period, broadband availability, measured by 16 Mbps transmission rates, more than doubled in German ...

The Productivity Puzzle in Business Services

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 ...

Economic Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses

The existential threat to small businesses, based on their crucial role in the economy, is behind the plethora of scholarly studies in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining the 14 contributions of the special issue on the "Economic Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses," the paper comprises four parts: a systematic review of the literature on the ...

The Productivity Puzzle in Business Services

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 ...

Warum vor allem weibliche Selbstständige Verliererinnen der Covid-19-Krise sind

Die Covid-19-Pandemie hat das Leben vieler Menschen negativ beeinflusst. Auf Basis einer Sonderbefragung des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP-CoV) zeigt sich, dass die Pandemie die rund 4,2 Millionen Selbstständigen in Deutschland im Vergleich zu den abhängig Beschäftigten stärker getroffen hat. Dabei besteht ein deutlicher Gender Gap: Während 47 Prozent der selbstständigen Männer Einkommensverluste ...

Folgen der Corona-Krise für Selbstständige

COVID-19: a Crisis of the Female Self-Employed

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 ...

COVID-19: a Crisis of the Female Self-Employed

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 ...

Selbstständige brauchen Perspektiven