Topic Productivity

What Do Insurers Do Differently Than One Another? Managed Competition and Value Added

Remunicipalization, Corporatization, and Outsourcing: The Performance of Public-Sector Firms after Reorganization

This article investigates the impact of reorganization on productivity within public-sector firms addressing the owners' composition, the board-management relationship, and the management's decision to outsource activities. Considering a large panel of 2,325 German municipally owned utilities between 2003 and 2014, firm-level productivity is estimated based on a control function approach. Contrary ...

Income-Based Family Typology and Child Development: Evidence from the UK

Our paper contributes to the literature studying how household conditions can influence children’s development, focusing on the type of family model where children grow up, defined on the basis of parental employment status and relative earnings. The traditional “male-breadwinner” model is no longer the only type of family that has been observed throughout recent decades; the “dual-breadwinner” family ...

Intangible 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 provides evidence that investment in intangible capital, despite having a positive effect on productivity at the micro level, is a driver of the weak productivity performance at the aggregate level as it amplifies ...

SOEP-LEE2: Linking Surveys on Employees to Employers in Germany

This article presents the new linked employee-employer study of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP-LEE2), which offers new research opportunities for various academic fields. In particular, the study contains two waves of an employer survey for persons in dependent work that is also linkable to the SOEP, a large representative German annual household panel (SOEP-LEE2-Core). Moreover, SOEP-LEE2 includes ...

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

A Lasting Crisis Affects R&D Decisions of Smaller Firms: The Greek Experience

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 ...

SOEP 2022 - 14th International German Socio-Economic Panel User Conference

The 14th International German Socio-Economic Panel User Conference (SOEP2022) will be held in Berlin from June 30 to July 1, 2022 at DIW Berlin. The conference provides researchers who use the SOEP (including the SOEP part of the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) and LIS/LWS data) with the opportunity to present and discuss their work with their peers. Researchers of all disciplines (e.g.,...

Testing the Superstar Firm Hypothesis

Firms with superior productivity, labeled superstar firms, are argued to be the link between rising concentration and the fall of the aggregate labor share in the US. This analysis confirms that similar evidence is found within the European context: the market share and firm size increase, whereas the labor share decreases with productivity. One of the much discussed mechanisms behind this development ...

Intangible 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 intangible capital, despite having a positive effect on productivity at the micro level, is a driver of the weak productivity performance at the aggregate level ...