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This study examines the impact of German public start-up assistance programmes administered by the Deutsche Ausgleichsbank (DtA) on the performance of young firms. The empirical analysis is based on firms from the ZEW Entrepreneurship Study that either received start-up loans in one or more DtA schemes or did not receive any funding from the DtA at all. The paper applies a non-parametric matching approach often applied by labour market economists. The interesting success measure is the average annual employment growth rate over a six year period and the resulting causal effect is the difference of this measure between the group of subsidized firms and the selected control group firms that did not receive any DtA start-up loans. The empirical analysis shows that DtA start-up loans significantly improve the average employment growth rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article makes an empirical contribution to the confirmation of the stylized fact that the performance of firms deteriorates in the years before exit. This empirical study contributes to the research question if market exits realize a worse pre-exit performance compared to nearly identical surviving firms. A non-parametric matching procedure is used in the empirical analysis to find the matched firm pairs consisting of similar exiting and surviving firms. The research has been supported by the German National Science Foundation (DFG) under the grant STA 169/10-1.

This study analyzes the effects of public R&D policy schemes on the innovation activities of firms in Eastern Germany. The main question in this context is whether public funds stimulate R&D activities or simply crowd out privately financed R&D. Empirically, we investigate the average causal effects of all public R&D schemes in Eastern Germany using a nonparametric matching approach. Compared to the case in which no public financial means are provided, it turns out that firms increase their innovation activities by about four percentage points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to empirically identify factors that influence the probability of being a fast-growing firm in Eastern and Western Germany. Descriptive analyses have shown that most firms experience only small positive or negative employment growth or stagnate over time. The job generation mechanism rests with a handful of firms that increase their employment significantly over time. The empirical analysis shows that the probability of being a fast-growing firm depends on different factors when separating Eastern and Western Germany as well as using different definitions of fast-growing firms. Moreover, the analysis shows that technology-intensive manufacturing branches and knowledge-based business-related services do not generate the majority of fast-growing firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on a study which evaluated the applicability of Gibrat's law to firms founded between 1989 and 1984 within the West German manufacturing sector. Empirical relevance of the law; Derivation of the model used for the law; Industrial application of the law.

Deals with the explanation of variations in growth between New Technology-based firms (NTBF) and non-innovative firm foundations. Factors that influence the growth rates of innovative and non-innovative firms; Theoretical models on the growth of NTBF; Derivation of the growth model; Results of the growth regressions.