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Diskussionspapiere 2009 / 2022
We use the prolonged Greek crisis as a case study to understand how a lasting economic shock affects the innovation strategies of firms in economies with moderate innovation activities. Adopting the 3-stage CDM model, we explore the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity for different size groups of Greek manufacturing firms during the prolonged crisis. At the first stage, we find that the ...
2022| Ioannis Giotopoulos, Alexander S. Kritikos, Aggelos Tsakanikas
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Diskussionspapiere 2002 / 2022
We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-employed people’s mental health. Using representative longitudinal survey data from Germany, we reveal differential effects by gender: whereas self-employed women experienced a substantial deterioration in their mental health, self-employed men displayed no significant changes up to early 2021. Financial losses are important in explaining these ...
2022| Marco Caliendo, Daniel Graeber, Alexander S. Kritikos, Johannes Seebauer
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Diskussionspapiere 1988 / 2021
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 ...
2021| Tomaso Duso, Mattia Nardotto, Alexander Schiersch
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Diskussionspapiere 1961 / 2021
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 ...
2021| Maksim Belitski, Christina Guenther, Alexander S. Kritikos, Roy Thurik
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Diskussionspapiere 1960 / 2021
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 ...
2021| Alexander S. Kritikos, Alexander Schiersch, Caroline Stiel
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Diskussionspapiere 1924 / 2020
The self-employed are among those facing the highest probability of strong income losses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments in many countries introduced support programs to support the self-employed, including the German federal government, which approved a €50bn emergency aid program at the end of March 2020 offering one-off lump-sum payments of up to €15,000 to those facing substantial revenue ...
2020| Joern Block, Alexander S. Kritikos, Maximilian Priem, Caroline Stiel
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Diskussionspapiere 1903 / 2020
We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic, and of the government-mandated measures to contain its spread, affected the self-employed relative to employed individuals in Germany and, secondly, to what extent the female self-employed were more strongly hit than their male counterparts. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data where respondents are asked about ...
2020| Daniel Graeber, Alexander S. Kritikos, Johannes Seebauer
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Diskussionspapiere 1868 / 2020
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 ...
2020| Marie Le Mouel, Alexander Schiersch
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Diskussionspapiere 1849 / 2020
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 ...
2020| Alexander Schiersch, Caroline Stiel
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Diskussionspapiere 1829 / 2019
As the policy debate on entrepreneurship increasingly centers on firm growth in terms of job creation, it is important to better understand which variables influence the first hiring decision and which ones influence the subsequent survival as an employer. Using the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP), we analyze what role individual characteristics of entrepreneurs play in sustainable job creation. ...
2019| Marco Caliendo, Frank M. Fossen, Alexander S. Kritikos