Thema Produktivität

Common Ownership, Markups and Productivity: Evidence from European Firms

This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract:  This paper analyzes the relationship between common ownership – when two firms are partially held by the same investor – and markups. Combining firm-level financial data from Europe with ownership data of publicly listed firms, we structurally estimate production...

Medienbasierter Index zeigt: Epidemien bringen in der Regel dauerhafte wirtschaftliche Einbußen mit sich

Die Verbreitung des Corona-Virus trifft die Wirtschaft weltweit hart. Wie hart genau, ist jedoch schwer vorherzusehen. Prognosen über den Verlauf und die wirtschaftlichen Folgen von Epidemien sind auch deshalb sehr unsicher, weil es an entsprechenden Modellen für die Dynamik von Epidemien mangelt. Ein nachrichtenbasierter Epidemieindex, der Medienberichte für den Zeitraum von Januar...

Kapitalgedeckt finanzierte Pflegekosten: Machbarkeitsstudie; Gutachten

Demografie bedingt steigende Mehrfinanzierungsbedarfe in der Sozialen Pflegeversicherung (SPV), die aus einem ab dem Jahr 2040 konstanten Beitragssatz erwachsen, könnten dauerhaft aus den Überschüssen eines Fonds kapitalgedeckt finanziert werden – eine langfristig positive Rendite-Zins-Differenz vorausgesetzt. Der Kapitalaufbau erfolgt über die Ausgabe von Bundesanleihen, die nach 20 Jahren einmalig ...

Knowledge-Based Capital and Productivity Divergence

Understanding the causes of the slowdown in aggregate productivity growth is key to maintaining the competitiveness of advanced economies and ensuring long-term economic prosperity. This paper is the first to provide evidence that investment in Knowledge-Based Capital (KBC), despite having a positive effect on productivity at the micro level, is a driver of the weak productivity performance at the ...

Refugees’ and Irregular Migrants’ Self-selection into Europe: Who Migrates Where?

We analyze self-selection of refugees and irregular migrants and test our theory in the context of the European refugee crisis. Using unique datasets from the International Organization for Migration and Gallup World Polls, we provide the first large-scale evidence on reasons to emigrate, and the self-selection and sorting of refugees and irregular migrants. Refugees and female irregular migrants are ...

Waiting for My Sentence: Air Pollution and the Productivity of Court Rulings

I assert that air pollution from nitrogen oxides affects the productivity of employees in Mexican court hearings. This is the first article analyzing this connection and the first to disentangle work-breaks from the productivity of white-collar workers. I merge hourly pollution with granular hearing data under the assumption that the length of the hearing approximates productivity and identify causality ...

Testing the Superstar Firm Hypothesis

The superstar firms model provides a compelling explanation for two simultaneously occurring phenomena: the rise of concentration in industries and the fall of labor shares. Our empirical analysis confirms two of the underlying assumptions of the model: the market share increases and the labor share decreases with increasing firm-level total factor productivity, providing support for the superstar ...

Working Life and Human Capital Investment: Causal Evidence from Pension Reform

This paper presents a life-cycle model with human capital investment during working life through training and provides a novel empirical test of human capital theory. We exploit a sizable pension reform across adjacent cohorts in a regression discontinuity setting and find that an increase in working life increases training. We discuss and test further predictions regarding the relation between initial ...

Consequences of Overeducation among Career Starters in Germany: A Trap for the Vocationally Trained as well as for University Graduates?

Research on the consequences of starting in overeducation often focuses on either secondary or tertiary graduates. We focus on both within one country, Germany. While matching and search models imply the improvement of initial overeducation, human capital theory and stigma associated with overeducation predict entrapment. The strongly skill- and occupation-based labour market for the vocationally trained ...

Microfirms and Innovation in the Service Sector