Search

Can publicly available, web-scraped data be used to identify promising business startups at an early stage? To answer this question, we use such textual and non-textual information about the names of Danish firms and their addresses as well as their business purpose statements (BPSs) supplemented by core accounting information along with founder and initial startup characteristics to forecast the performance of newly started enterprises over a five years' time horizon. The performance outcomes we consider are involuntary exit, above–average employment growth, a return on assets of above 20 percent, new patent applications and participation in an innovation subsidy program. Our first key finding is that our models predict startup performance with either high or very high accuracy with the exception of high returns on assets where predictive power remains poor. Our second key finding is that the data requirements for predicting performance outcomes with such accuracy are low. To forecast the two innovation-related performance outcomes well, we only need to include a set of variables derived from the BPS texts while an accurate prediction of startup survival and high employment growth needs the combination of (i) information derived from the names of the startups, (ii) data on elementary founder-related characteristics and (iii) either variables describing the initial characteristics of the startup (to predict startup survival) or business purpose statement information (to predict high employment growth). These sets of variables are easily obtainable since the underlying information is mandatory to report upon business registration. The substantial accuracy of our predictions for survival, employment growth, new patents and participation in innovation subsidy programs indicates ample scope for algorithmic scoring models as an additional pillar of funding and innovation support decisions.

We compare individuals presently employed either at an university or at a firm from a R&D intensive sector and analyze which of their personal-specific and employer-specific characteristics determine their choice of subsequently founding a startup. Our data set is unusually rich and combines the population of Danish employees with their present employers. We focus on persons who at least hold a Bachelor's degree in engineering, sciences and health and track them over the time period 2001-2012. We show that (i) there are overall little differences between the characteristics of university and corporate startup entrepreneurs, (ii) common factors triggering startup activity of both university and corporate employees are education, top management team membership, previous job mobility and being male, (iii) it is exclusively human capital-related characteristics that affect startup choice of university employees while (iv) the characteristics of the present workplace constitute major factors of entrepreneurial activity.

How valuable is work experience with advocacy groups, e.g. Greenpeace, for new hires of innovative firms? We integrate strategic human capital with stakeholder theory and suggest that this experience creates scarce human capital (knowledge, skills, abilities) facilitating innovations acceptable and legitimate for stakeholders such as regulators or residents. We argue that such human capital is complementary to firm resources and leads to a value surplus. Individuals with advocacy group work experience can subsequently appropriate at least parts of that surplus through higher salaries. Using matched data for 10,303 employees in Denmark, we find that new hires of innovative firms with advocacy group human capital enjoy salary premiums which are stronger in mature and technologically concentrated firms. Our findings have important implications for HR decision making.

We review and condense the body of literature on the economic returns of public R&D on private R&D and find that: (i) private returns to R&D appear to be large and larger than the returns to alternative investments; (ii) private R&D and R&D subsidies are positively correlated and there is no evidence for crowding out; (iii) R&D cooperation increases private R&D; (iv) there appear to exist complementarities between alternative sources of funding; (v) the mobility of R&D workers, particularly of university scientists, is positively related to innovation; (vi) there are many university spin-offs but these are no more successful than non-university spin-offs; (vii) universities constitute important collaboration partners and (viii) clusters enhance collaboration, patents and productivity. Key problems for economic policy advice are that the identification of causal effects is problematic in most studies and that little is known about the optimal design of policy measures.

We study the effects of a change in the way patient reimbursements are calcu- lated on the prices of pharmaceuticals using quasi-experimental data for Denmark which switched from external (where reimbursements are based on prices of similar products in foreign countries) to internal reference pricing (where they are based on the cheapest domestic substitute). We analyze three therapeutic classes with differ- ent treatment durations and show that the reform led to substantial price decreases for our lifelong treatment and to less substantial price reductions for our medium duration treatment while we do not find significant effects on our acute treatment. Moreover, the reform did only affect generics and did not impact original products or parallel imports.

We study the effects of a Danish wage subsidy program for highly educated workers on the labor market outcomes of the persons participating in the program and on the performance of the firms that hired these subsidized workers. Using data on the population of program participants, both individuals and firms, we find that the program had positive effects on employment and wages the year individuals participate in the program. For wages, we also find positive and statistically significant effects for the two subsequent years. At the program participating firm level, we find statistically significant effects on the number of highly educated employees for both the period of program participation and the subsequent time period.

We investigate the effect of mobility of R&D workers on the total patenting activity of their employers. Our study documents how mobile workers affect the patenting activity of the firm they join and the firm they leave. The effect of labor mobility is strongest if workers join from patent-active firms. We also find evidence of a positive feedback effect on the former employer's patenting from workers who have left for another patent- active firm. Summing up the effects of joining and leaving workers, we show that labor mobility increases the total innovative activity of the new and the old employer. Our study which is based on the population of R&D active Danish firms observed between 1999 and 2004 thus provides firm-level support for the notion that labor mobility stimulates overall innovation of a country or region due to knowledge transfer.

We estimate the relative contribution of mobile scientists who leave academia for the private sector on the subsequent innovative performance of the firms they join. We use data on the population of Danish firms and their R&D workers for the period 1999-2004 and measure innovation performance by the (value-adjusted) number of patent applications at the European Patent Office. We compare the efficacy of mobile former university scientists to the effects of mobile workers hired from other firms as well as immobile workers on the innovation performance of their employer. Our main result is that mobile university scientists contribute substantially more to innovation than R&D workers hired from other firms who, in turn, contribute slightly less to industrial innovation than recent university graduates. By contrast, immobile workers add little to the innovative activity of their employer. We also find that the contribution of mobile R&D workers to innovation depreciates fairly rapidly. These findings provide us with three main managerial implications: Firstly, hiring scientists from universities is a way of boosting a firm’s innovative activity. Secondly, because hires from academia receive lower wages on average than hires from private sector firms, this implies that hiring R&D workers from academia may be a cost-effective way of improving innovation performance. Thirdly, firms need to take measures in order to further public-private researcher interaction to prevent the depreciation of the knowledge stock of their employees.

We study the mapping between labor mobility and industrial innovative activity for the population of R&D active Danish firms observed between 1999 and 2004. Our study documents a positive relationship between the number of workers who join a firm and the firm’s innovative activity. This relationship is stronger if workers join from innovative firms. We also find evidence for positive feedback from workers who leave for an innovative firm, presumably because the worker who left stays in contact with their former colleagues. This implies that the positive feedback (“social network effects”) that has been found by other studies not only exists but even outweighs the disruption and loss of knowledge occurring to the previous employer from the worker leaving. Summing up the effects of joining and leaving workers, we find ample evidence for mobility to be associated with an increase in total innovative activity of the new and the old employer.

Subsidized research joint ventures (RJVs) between public research institutions and industry have become increasingly popular in Europe and the US. We study the long-run effects of such a support scheme that has been maintained by the Danish government since 1995. To cope with identification problems we apply nearest neighbor caliper matching and conditional difference-in-difference estimation methods. Our main findings are that (i) program participation effects are instant for annual patent applications and last for three years, (ii) employment effects materialize first after one year and (iii) there are no statistically significant effects on value added or labor productivity. We further show that these overall results are primarily driven by firms that were patent active prior to joining the RJV and that there are no statistically significant effect for large firms. Both types of firms are disproportionally represented in the support program we study.

We examine the scope and value of targeted advertising in the magazine industry. We use data on reader characteristics at individual media, in contrast to previous work that has needed to infer this information from aggregate data. Our results show a strong relationship between subscriber characteristics and advertising prices. Advertisers clearly value more homogenous groups of readers, measured according to income, gender and age. Our results explain recent trends of declining advertising expenditures in print media, in favor of increasing online advertising.

Determining the research and development (R&D) boundaries of the firm as the choice between internal, collaborative and external technology acquisition has since long been a major challenge for firms to secure a continuous stream of innovative products or processes. While research on R&D cooperation or strategic alliances is abundant, little is known about the outsourcing of R&D activities to contract research organizations and its implications for innovation performance. This paper investigates the driving forces of external technology sourcing through contract research based on arguments from transaction cost theory and the resource-based view of the firm. Using a large and comprehensive data set of innovating firms from Germany our findings suggest that technological uncertainty, contractual experience and openness to external knowledge sources motivate the choice for engaging in contract research activities. Moreover, we show that internal and external R&D sourcing are complements: the marginal contribution of internal (external) R&D is the larger the more firms spend on external (internal) R&D.

Globalization has provided many companies with new opportunities for growth and efficiency. This requires them to operate successfully across cultural and social borders. These can be stumbling blocks to internationalization and have been found to cause frequent errors and delays for multinational companies. Such liabilities of foreignness are persistent in nature. We investigate the causes behind these detrimental effects. We identify two major factors conceptually: a lack of legitimacy in the host country on the demand side and a lack of responsiveness on the side of the multinational corporation. We test these hypotheses empirically using a comprehensive sample of the German car market, which is especially suitable due to its established domestic producers and international competitors. Our results suggest that the two factors interact. For less experienced customer groups, we find that legitimacy is the dominant factor behind the effects of liability of foreignness. As customer experience increases, liability of foreignness caused by a lack of responsiveness becomes more of an issue.

We analyze the relationship between website visits, magazine demand and the demand for advertising pages using Granger non-causality tests on the ba- sis of an extensive and externally audited quarterly data set for the German magazine market spanning the period I/1998 to II/2004. We use traditional panel data estimators and an estimator suitable for heterogeneity across mag- azines. We find very robust evidence for positive effects from website visits to circulation. There is no evidence of causality running in the opposite direction. Our findings are contrary to the widespread belief that the Internet will cannibalize print media markets.

This paper uses Granger non-causality tests to analyze if channel competition exists between the companion websites of 93 German newspapers observed between I/1998 and II/2005. It provides econometric evidence for significant negative effects of companion website traffic on the print circulation of national newspapers and for significantly positive effects on local newspapers, at least for the period since I/2002.

Die aktuelle Diskussion um die Novellierung der deutschen Pressefusionskontrolle macht deutlich, welche Relevanz medienökonomische Fragestellungen haben. Was jedoch bei dieser Diskussion häufig vernachlässigt wird, ist die intensive Betrachtung der Ökonomischen Besonderheiten von Medienmärkten, nämlich der Verbundenheit von Anzeigen- und Publikumsmarkt, die Existenz von Kostendegressionen und eine unterschiedliche Marktmacht von Printmedien auf dem Anzeigen- und Publikumsmarkt. Diese Arbeit analysiert diese Charakteristika und deren Wirkungen bei möglichen Unternehmenszusammenschlüssen. Im Ergebnis zeigt sich, dass aufgrund der Heterogenität der einzelnen Märkte eine intensivere Einzelfallbetrachtung und eine stärkere Ökonomisierung der Fusionskontrolle sinnvoll erscheint. Grundlage dieser Ökonomisierung könnten quantitative Analysen sein, die mithilfe vorhandener Marktdaten durchgeführt werden können.

This paper analyzes the persistence of firms' exporting behavior in a panel of West German manufacturing firms. Dynamic binary choice models allow us to distinguish between true and spurious state dependence in firm performance. Using random effects models as well as a recent fixed effect approach which imposes few restrictions on unobservables, we find robust evidence of state dependence in the current export status of firms. Unobserved permanent firm heterogeneity ("spurious state dependence") is found to be less important than suggested by earlier studies. The existence of true state dependence in exports has direct economic policy implications: if policy successfully turns non-exporters into exporters, the effect is likely to be lasting.

We implement an endogeneous switching-regression model for labour productivity and firms' decision to use business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. Our approach allows B2B usage to affect any parameter of the labour productivity equation and to properly take account of strategic complementarities between the input factors and B2B usage. Empirical evidence from 1,394 German firms shows that firms using B2B e-commerce have a significantly higher output elasticity with respect to ICT-investment and produce significantly more efficiently than firms that do not use B2B. Firms' labour productivity is enhanced by using B2B.

"The author derives and estimates a model for profit maximization of German magazines. Quarterly data on German women's magazines observed between 1998 and 2001 are used in the econometrics. Main empirical results are that magazines with particularly circulation-sensitive advertising prices set cover prices below marginal cost and there are large and highly significant returns to scale and scope in production." (author's abstract) "Diese Arbeit entwickelt und schätzt ein Modell für die Gewinnmaximierung deutscher Zeitschriften. In der ökonometrischen Analyse werden vierteljährliche Daten des Zeitraums 1998 bis 2001 verwendet. Es zeigt sich, dass die Preise von Zeitschriften, deren Anzeigenpreis besonders stark auf Veränderungen in der verkauften Auflage reagieren, deutlich unter den Produktionskosten liegen. Zudem finden sich grosse und hochsignifikante Skalenerträge." (Autorenreferat)

Multivariate Tobit models are estimated using German cross?sectional data to test whether strategic complementarities exist between expenditures in four different types of ICT?components. If two ICT?components are complements, they are correlated (provided that agents act rationally). Significant correlations between all four types of ICT?expenditures are found and can neither be removed by ?standard? firm heterogeneity control variables such as firm size, firms? workforce qualification structure nor by firms? ICT?structure so that indication for the presence of complementarities is provided.

Actors on print media markets face two different (and interrelated) demand curves: the demand for copies and the demand for advertising space. This paper develops a realistic, yet simple, model of print media industries. In contrast to earlier studies, it takes into account that print media firms can neither set advertising space nor its price. A main finding of this paper is that competitive concerns regarding recent concentrations in print media industries are likely to be overstated since a print media firms? cover pricing is limited by its feedback on advertising demand.

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die personalwirtschaftlichen Aspekte der Fremdvergabe von IT-Leistungen. Er bietet einen systematischen Überblick über bestehende theoretische und empirische Arbeiten zum Thema IT-Outsourcing und legt dabei einen besonderen Schwerpunkt auf die personalwirtschaftlichen Komponenten der ITFremdvergabeentscheidung. Aus dem Überblick werden Hypothesen hinsichtlich der Wirkungsrichtung verschiedener Determinanten des IT-Outsourcings abgeleitet. Diese Hypothesen werden einem empirischen Test unterzogen. Auf Grundlage eines großzahligen Datensatzes (N=679) wird die Fremdvergabeentscheidung von (i) Betreuung und Wartung von Hard- und Software, (ii) Programmierleistungen und (iii) EDV-Schulungen analysiert. Die Schätzergebnisse zeigen, dass personalwirtschaftliche Variablen wie Weiterbildung, Mangel an qualifizierten Mitarbeitern, Qualifikationsniveau der Mitarbeiter und Unternehmensgröße einen hohen Erklärungsbeitrag liefern. Unsere Resultate lassen sich u.a. als Beleg für strategische Komplementarität zwischen verschiedenen Outsourcing-Entscheidungen interpretieren. This paper analyzes those aspects of IT outsourcing decisions that are related to personnel economics. It offers a systematic overview of existing theoretical and empirical studies on that issue. We draw empirically testable hypotheses from our overview and take them to data. Based on a comparatively large data set that comprises of 679 obser-vations, we estimate the determinants of outsourcing (i) hardware and software admini-stration and maintenance, (ii) programming services and (iii) IT training. The estimation results indicate that variables such as training, lack of qualified employees, skill structure of employees, and firm size have significant effects on the decision to outsource IT services. Our results also suggest that strategic complementarities exist between the various outsourcing decisions.

I derive and estimate a model for cover price setting in print media markets where actors are faced by two interrelated demand curves: the demand for the print medium and the demand for advertising space. Publicly available data on German women?s magazines observed between 1998 and 2001 are used in the GMM estimation. Main findings are that my estimated marginals cost coincide well with those of industry sources, magazines with a high circulation elasticity of advertising demand price markedly below marginal cost and website provision neither has a significant effect on magazine nor on advertising demand. Keywords: magazines, cost estimation, GMM estimation, website provision

What happens to demand if a magazine launches a website? This question is empirically analyzed for the German women?s magazine market, a particularly large segment of the German magazine where fierce competition is reigning. Models for differentiated product demand are estimated on panel data covering the period 1990 to 2000, showing that website provision does not significantly affect magazines? market shares. Magazines that launched a website face a significantly lower price elasticity of demand than competitors that did not go online. Descriptive evidence on the magazines? website contents shows that websites are used to provide supplementary information and to advertise current print issues.

The determinants of transitions between different states of financial distress are analyzed using two versions of Markov chain models: a multinomial logit model without random effects and a multinomial logit model capturing such unobservable factors. The empirical analysis is based on a panel data set containing information on 15,538 East German firms founded between 1994 and 1999. The estimation results indicate that the effect of limited liability depends upon firms' starting state, the existence of corporate shareholders improves firms' financial performance, multiple credit relationships have negative effects and product diversification as well as positive macroeconomic conditions improve firms' financial performance.

This paper derives a three stage Cournot?oligopoly game for product innovation, expenditure on introducing the product and competition on the product market. Product innovation is assumed to increase consumer utility but is effective only if the innovating firm invests in marketing, so that consumers become aware of the newly developed product. Firms first decide whether or not to conduct product innovation and then determine their expenditure for bringing the new product to the market. In the final stage of the game, they are involved in competition on the product market. Key findings of the theoretical model are that both the marketing of a product innovation and a firm?s propensity to introduce an innovation decrease with an increase in the number of competitors and the degree of product substitutability. An increase in market demand has a positive effect on product innovation and marketing effort. These findings are tested empirically using survey data from 519 German service sector firms which mainly produce consumer goods. A simultaneous sequential Tobit model is applied in the empirical part of this paper. It turns out that the predictions of the theoretical model are supported by the empirical findings.

This paper investigates if significant differences exist between online and paper & pencil participants in a quarterly business survey in the German business?related services sector when respondents may freely choose to respond either online or by more conventional methods. It also analyzes the determinants of online participation and studies if item?nonresponse is reduced when respondents participate online. Online respondents, indeed, significantly differ from paper & pencil participants with respect to their ordinal sales and price assessments, with online participants being less optimistic on both counts than their paper & pencil counterparts. These differences are not attributable to observable firm characteristics as far as sales judgements are concerned and they disappear once it is controlled for observable firm heterogeneity in the case of price assessments. Significant differences in the judgement of demand, profit and employment as well as in the expectations concerning sales, prices, demand, profit and employment cannot be found. Binary probit model estimation results indicate that online participation is not significantly affected by sector affiliation, affiliation to East or West Germany nor information technology endowment. Firms with between 1 and 19 employees are, however, significantly less likely than larger firms to participate online. A significant correlation between online participation and unit?nonresponse does not exist, as a bivariate probit model with sample selection estimation results show. In general, item?nonresponse tends to be higher for online?respondents.

This paper derives a three stage Cournot duopoly game for research collaboration, research expenditures and product market competition. The amount of knowledge firms can absorb is made dependent on their own research efforts, e.g. firms? absorptive capacity is treated as an endogenous variable. It is shown that cooperating firms invest more in R&D than non?cooperating firms if spillovers are sufficiently large. The degree of market competition is a key determinant of the effects of research cooperation on research efforts, implying that existing models which assume perfect competition might be too restrictive.

This paper analyzes the relationship between investment in information and communication technologies (ICT), non-ICT-investment, labor productivity and workplace reorganization. Firms are assumed to reorganize workplaces if the productivity gains arising from workplace reorganization exceed the associated reorganization costs. Two different types of organizational change are considered : introduction of group-work and flattening of hierarchies. Empirical evidence is provided for a sample of 411 firms from the German business-related services sector. We develop and estimate a model for labor productivity and firms' decision to re-organize workplaces that allows workplace reorganization to affect any parameter of the labor productivity equation. Our general and flexible methodology allows to properly take account of strategic complementarities between the input factors and workplace reorganization. The estimation results show that changes in human resources practices do not significantly affect firms' output elasticities with respect to information and communication technologies (ICT), non-ICT-capital and labor although most of the point estimates of the individual output elasticities and of the control variables for observable firm heterogeneity are larger if workplace reorganization is realized. We therefore apply Kernel density estimation technique and demonstrate that for firms with organizational change the entire labor productivity distribution shifts significantly out to the right if workplace reorganization takes place, indicating that workplace reorganization induces an increase in labor productivity that is attributable to complementarities between the various input factors and workplace reorganization. By contrast, firms without organizational change would not have realized significant productivity gains if they had reorganized workplaces.

This paper describes simple econometric methods for the analysis of credit risk and applies them to a data set obtained from credit files taken from six large German universal banks. The paper focuses on (i) binary and ordered probit/logit models which enable the credit analyst to quantify the default probability of an individual credit, and (ii) on duration models capable of estimating the default probability of a credit at a certain point in time given that there was no default until then. Empirical examples for the methods facilitate the understanding of the econometric models described in the paper. Numerous suggestions for further reading complete this short walk down the econometric quantification of credit risk.

This paper derives a three stage Cournot duopoly game for research collaboration, research expenditures and product market competition. The amount of knowledge firms can absorb from other firms is made dependent on their own research efforts, e.g., firms? absorptive capacity is treated as an endogenous variable. It is shown that cooperating firms invest more in R&D than non?cooperating firms if spillovers are sufficiently large. Further, market demand and R&D productivity have a positive effect on R&D efforts both under research joint venture and under research competition. Firms? propensity to collaborate in R&D is increasing in R&D productivity. The key findings of the theoretical model are tested using German innovation survey data for the service sector. A simultaneous model for cooperation choice and innovation expenditures shows that R&D cooperation has a weakly significant positive effect on innovation expenditures. The empirical results broadly support the theoretical model.

This paper aims at providing business survey analysts with simple econometric tools to quantify qualitative survey data. We extend the traditional and commonly applied method proposed by Carlson and Parkin (1975) to capture observable survey respondent heterogeneity. We also discuss specification tests. The empirical analysis is based on business survey data taken from the ZEW's 'Service Sector Business Survey', a quarterly business survey in the German business-related service sector carried out since 1994.

No other area of the German economy has developed so emphatically in the past ten years as has that business-related services. Regardless of its growing overall economic importance, official statistics fail to provide economic researchers and economic policy with current data on the business-related service sector. In such a situation where quantitative information about certain sectors is lacking, data obtained from business survey give important information on the state of the economy. The outcome of such surveys crucially depends on the expansion factors attached to the responses of individual firms. In this paper it is shown how a robust method of calculating expansions factors can be obtained using known auxiliary totals from the population. Robust in the sense means that the expanded data of the ZEW/Creditreform business survey are insensitive to changes in the sample design while the non-expanded data are not.

This paper presents structural estimates for a bargaining model which neststhe right-to-manage, the efficient wage bargaining, the seniority and the standard neoclassical labor demand model as special cases. In contrast to most existing models, ourapproach accounts for heterogeneous skill groups which differ in terms of productivityand representation in the bargaining process through union preferences. The paper introduces the concept of 'virtual' firms which allows us to (i) test the efficient contract model against models implying that firms operate on the labor demand curve and to (i) overcome a potential misspecification of firms' output markets.Estimates of structural parameters are obtained from a novel cross-section of German firms of the business related service sector which includes information on skill-specific wage rates at the firm level. Central results of this paper are that unions do care about both wages and employment in the bargaining process and that firms operate on thecontract curve. The bargaining power of unions in East Germany turns out to be muchweaker than in West Germany.

Der Beitrag untersucht die Verbreitung von Tarifverträgen in Dienstleistungsunternehmen sowie deren Wirkungen auf die Beschäftigungspolitik im Falle von Nachfrageschwankungen. Der empirische Teil basiert auf der ZEW/Creditreform Konjunkturumfrage bei unternehmensnahen Dienstleistungsunternehmen aus den Jahren 1996 bis 1999. 38 Prozent der Unternehmen in der Stichprobe wenden einen Tarifvertrag an. In den nicht-tarifgebundenen Unternehmen werden in 87 Prozent die Arbeitsbedingungen einzelvertraglich ausgehandelt. Die ökonometrischen Ergebnisse auf der Grundlage von geordneten Panelprobitmodellen unter Berücksichtigung unbeobachteter unternehmensspezifischer Heterogenität deuten darauf hin, daß Tarifverträge die unternehmerische Beschäftigungspolitik beeinflussen. Im Falle von Nachfrageschwankungen wenden tarifgebundene Unternehmen die Instrumente Neueinstellungen und Überstunden/Kurzarbeit signifikant seltener als nichttarifgebundene Unternehmen an.

Im Mittelpunkt dieses Beitrag stehen Verweildauermodelle und deren Verwendung als Analyseinstrumente für die Bewertung und Berechnung von Kreditausfallrisiken. Verschiedene Möglichkeiten zur Berechnung der Dauer des Nichtausfalls eines Kredites werden dabei vorgestellt. Die hier vorgestellten Verfahren werden auf einen aus Kreditakten von sechs deutschen Universalbanken zusammengestellten Datensatz angewendet. Beispiele und Interpretationshilfen zu den jeweils vorgestellten Methoden erleichtern den Zugang zu diesen Modellen. Es werden zahlreiche Hinweise auf weiterführende Literatur gegeben. This paper discusses duration models for the quantification of credit risk. Econometric techniques to quantify the duration of a credit in a “non-default” state are analyzed and applied to a data set obtained from credit files taken from six large German universal banks. Empirical examples for the methods facilitate the understanding of the econometric models described in the paper. Numerous suggestions for further reading complete this paper.

Dieser Beitrag stellt verschiedene ökonometrische Methoden zur Bewertung und Berechnung von Kreditausfallrisiken vor und wendet diese auf einen aus Kreditakten von sechs deutschen Universalbanken zusammengestellten Daten-satz an. Im Mittelpunkt stehen dabei (i) binäre bzw. geordnete Logit- und Pro-bitmodelle, mit deren Hilfe die Ausfallwahrscheinlichkeit eines Kredites geschätzt werden kann, sowie (ii) Verweildauermodelle, mit denen die Gefahr eines Kreditausfalls unter Berücksichtigung der Verweildauer im Nichtausfallzu-stand quantifiziert werden kann. Beispiele und Interpretationshilfen zu den je-weils vorgestellten Methoden erleichtern den Zugang zu diesen Modellen. Es werden zahlreiche Hinweise auf weiterführende Literatur gegeben.

We analyze the performance of firms in the German business-related services sector. A quarterly business survey provides the panel data base of our study. Firm performance is measured by the survey respondents? ordinal indication of their changes in total sales. We use a firstorder Markov chain and a multinomial logit specification to model the transition probabilitites. Three variants of the model are estimated: a linear index model with and without unobserved firm heterogeneity and a semiparametric model. Main results are that firm size has a positive effect on firm performance, that young firms outperform older competitors, that a bank-relationship with a single creditor has a stabilizing effect and that the degree of diversification has a negative impact on firm performance. The legal status appears to have no significant effect.

Dieser Beitrag stellt verschiedene ökonometrische Methoden zur Bewertung und Berechnung von Kreditausfallrisiken vor und wendet diese auf einen Datensatz sechs deutscher Universalbanken an. Im Mittelpunkt stehen dabei Logit- und Probitmodelle, mit deren Hilfe die Ausfallwahrscheinlichkeit eines Kredites geschätzt werden kann. Dabei werden auch moderne Verfahren zur Analyse von Paneldaten besprochen. Beispiele undInterpretationshilfen zu den jeweils vorgestellten Methoden erleichtern den Zugang zu diesen Modellen. Es werden zahlreiche Hinweise auf weiterführende Literatur gegeben. This paper describes simple econometric methods for the analysis of credit risk and applies them to a data set obtained from credit files taken from six large German universal banks. The paper focuses on probit and logit models which enable the credit analyst to quantify the default probability of an individual credit. Recent developments in the analysis of panel data are also introduced. Empirical examples for the methods facilitate the understanding of the econometric models described in the paper. Numerous suggestions for further reading complete this short walk down the econometric quantification of credit risk.

Virtually all empirical firm-level studies on the demand for labor do not include labor cost in the econometric specification. This is due to the fact that business and innovation survey data usually lack information on labor cost. This paper shows how reliable skill-specific and firm-specific labor cost can be calculated from firm-level data on the basis of information on total labor cost and firms' skill mix only. The simple method proposed here is applied to German innovation survey data.

In this paper it is tested which of the various alternative approaches for constructing knowledge spillover pools suggested in existing literature measures the extent to which a firm can costlessly receive external knowlegde best. Since knowledge spillovers are unmeasurable, a 'goodness of fit' measure is constructed using innovation survey data. It turns out that measures of the uncentered correlation of firm characteristics seem to fit actual knowledge spillovers best. Direct measures constructed from innovation survey data appear to work reasonably well while measures of the Euclidean technological distance and of the geographical distance lead to counterintuitive results. Empirical evidence is provided for both the German service sector and the manufacturing sector.

No other area of the German economy has developed so emphatically in the past ten years as that of business-related services. Regardless their growing importance, business-related services still play only a minor role in official statistics. Above all, official statistics do not provide up-to-date information on the state of the business cycle of this sector. In a situation where such quantitative information is lacking, data obtained from business surveys give important guidelines to the state of this part of the economy. In this paper we show how a relieble compounded business climate indicator for busniness-related services can be constructed from both business survey and national accounts data

In an a priori view, it is usually assumed that the business cycle of manufacturing industries leads the business cycle of the service sector. This seems to be even more plausible for the relationship between business-related services, whose high growth rates in recent years were largely due to increased outsourcing activities of the manufacturing sector. In this paper it is shown that the relationship is not as simple as it appears at first sight. We run Granger causality tests between sales growth rates of the business-related service sector against growth rates of various series of the manufacturing sector. It turns out that the relationship between business-related services and manufacturing is either contemporaneous or bi-directional, while no evidence is given for manufacturing leading business-related services.

This paper develops a three stage oligopoly game for R&D cooperation, R&D expenditure and product market competition. In the first stage, firms decide whether or not to conduct R&D in cooperation with other firms. In the second stage the level of R&D investment is determined. Finally, firms compete in a Cournot–oligopoly product market. While earlier models on R&D cooperation only considered process innovation, the model presented here also takes product innovation into account. It is shown that the optimal R&D investment has virtually the same structure for both process and product innovation. The main hypothesis of our theoretical model are tested in the empirical part of this paper.

Diese Dokumentation stellt einen Konjunkturindikator für einen Bereich vor, der von der amtlichen Statistik nur unzureichend erfaßt wird. Dieser Service Sentiment Indicator ermöglicht es, die konjunkturelle Situation im immer wichtiger werdenden Wirtschaftszweig unternehmensnahe Dienstleistungen zu erfassen. Trotz der unzureichenden Datenbasis für das Dienstleistungsgewerbe ist der Service Sentiment Indicator in der Lage, die aktuelle konjunkturelle Situation in diesem Bereich zu erkennen. Für die Konstruktion des Indikators werden sowohl Umfragedaten als auch Angaben aus der Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnung verwendet. Die Konstruktion des Indikators erfolgt in drei Schritten. In einem ersten Schritt wird die Veränderung der Bruttowertschöpfung für den Bereich sonstige Dienstleistungen aus der Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnung für das jeweils aktuelle Quartal prognostiziert. Die Daten aus der Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnung werden mit einer Verzögerung von einem Quartal bereitgestellt, so daß eine solche Prognose für den aktuellen Indikatorwert notwendig ist. Dieser Teilindikator mißt somit die objektive, rückwärtsorientierte Entwicklung. ...

This paper analyses the degree to which firms expect to be able to enter new markets, to develop new products and to contend with new foreign competition after the introduction of the Euro. Panel data taken from a quarterly business survey in the service sector are used for the empirical analysis. East German firms do not differ from their West German competitors in their expectations that the Euro will increase export activity and product innovation, but significantly more East German firms expect new foreign competitors to enter the home market. The impact of the Euro on firms' expectations of entering new markets and developing new products is stronger for firms which already export than for those who do not. Further, the degree of preparation for the Euro plays a significant role in firms' market expectations.

The impact of technology on the demand for heterogeneous labor is controversely discussed throughout the literature. New technology which is said to favor high skilled labor and to substitute low skilled labor is often considered as the main reason for the decline in relative demand for low skilled labor. While most analyses focus on manufacturing industries, this paper presents empirical evidence that technological skill bias is also present for business related services, an increasingly important sector in the German economy. Cross-sectional data from an innovation survey and panel data from a quarterly business survey in the service sector are used in the empirical investigation. The data allow to directly distinguish among five different skill groups. The micro-level data also allow the analysis of shifting employment patterns for a single economic unit. Ordered probit models are utilized to study the determinants of skill shifts in business related services. It turns out that investment in information and communication technologies is a complement of university graduates and a substitute for workers with completed vocational training. New capital goods are substitutive to low unskilled labor whereas the demand for technically skilled labor remains unaffected by investment decisions. A puzzling finding is that labor costs do not play an important role in the demand for university graduates, technically skilled and unskilled labor but turn out to be highly significant for skilled labor. Also, expected foreign competition has a significantly positive effect on the demand for both university graduates and unskilled labor alike while present foreign competition is only positively significant in the demand for university graduates.

This paper investigates the determinants of transaction price changes during BUND-future trading at Deutsche Terminbörse (DTB) and London International Financial Futures Exchange (LIFFE). The analysis uses the ordered probit model, which is an econometric tool that is comparatively new to the econometrics of financial markets. It is especially valuable with respect to high frequency data which are used for the empirical analysis of this paper. Although the ordered probit model is nonstructural, it allows to test the validity of market microstructure literature. A comparison of BUND-futures trading at DTB and LIFFE is also conducted. ; In dieser Arbeit werden die Determinanten von Transaktionspreisveränderungen während des BUND-Future Handels an der Deutschen Terminbörse (DTB) und der London International Financial Futures Exchange (LIFFE) untersucht. Die Analyse wird mit Hilfe eines geordneten Probitmodells durchgeführt, das bisher kaum für Finanzmarktdaten verwendet wurde. Obwohl das geordnete Probitmodell nichtstrukturell ist, erlaubt es, einige mikroökonomische Ansätze zur Erklärung bestimmter Marktphänomena auf ihre Richtigkeit hin zu Überprüfen. Die Untersuchung verwendet dabei Hochfrequenzdaten, deren Eigenschaften das geordnete Probitmodell in besonderem Maße Rechnung trägt. Außerdem wird ein Vergleich zwischen den beiden Börsen DTB und LIFFE angestellt.

This paper examines German business survey data to uncover the influence of political news on expectations concerning the starting date of the European Monetary Union (EMU). In this survey the participants were asked to indicate whether they expect a punctual or a delayed start of the EMU. Alternatively, they could also tick a don't know category. It is shown that political news actually influence answering patterns. While good news have a negative impact on the probability to cross don't know, they do not influence the probability to expect a delayed EMU start. Bad news, such as the heated debate about the convergence criteria at the Amsterdam EU summit, have a positive impact on the probability to expect a delayed start. The empirical results show that survey results generally have to be carefully interpreted if news about the topic which is investigated in the survey occur. If answering patterns are actually influenced by such news, the usual way to interprete survey responses - treating them as if they were sent back at the very same day - can lead to severe misunderstandings. In this paper a simple microeconometric technique is suggested which makes it possible to detect if survey responses are affected by news.

Can publicly available, web-scraped data be used to identify promising business startups at an early stage? To answer this question, we use such textual and non-textual information about the names of Danish firms and their addresses as well as their business purpose statements (BPSs) supplemented by core accounting information along with founder and initial startup characteristics to forecast the performance of newly started enterprises over a five years' time horizon. The performance outcomes we consider are involuntary exit, above-average employment growth, a return on assets of above 20 percent, new patent applications and participation in an innovation subsidy program. Our first key finding is that our models predict startup performance with either high or very high accuracy with the exception of high returns on assets where predictive power remains poor. Our second key finding is that the data requirements for predicting performance outcomes with such accuracy are low. To forecast the two innovation-related performance outcomes well, we only need to include a set of variables derived from the BPS texts while an accurate prediction of startup survival and high employment growth needs the combination of (i) information derived from the names of the startups, (ii) data on elementary founder-related characteristics and (iii) either variables describing the initial characteristics of the startup (to predict startup survival) or business purpose statement information (to predict high employment growth). These sets of variables are easily obtainable since the underlying information is mandatory to report upon business registration. The substantial accuracy of our predictions for survival, employment growth, new patents and participation in innovation subsidy programs indicates ample scope for algorithmic scoring models as an additional pillar of funding and innovation support decisions.