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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]

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether price expectations satisfy the rationality hypothesis in Muth's sense, using direct observations on price expectations included in the IFO business survey data. The IFO Institute of Munich has been conducting monthly panel surveys for over 5000 manufacturing establishments. They are asked, for one thing, whether their selling prices will increase, remain the same or decrease over the next three months. The question about the actual price changes is also included in the survey. If the problems arising due to the qualitative nature of the data are solved, this unique set of data should provide valuable information for the study of price expectations.
First, the data construction is explained in Section II. Then, Section III contains the development of several statistical measures of forecasting performance for the qualitative data. In Section IV the accuracy and consistency of prediction, are examined. Section V investigates the validity of the rational expectation hypothesis by testing the unbiasedness and efficiency of price expectations. The main empirical findings and their implications are discussed in Section VI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the effects of public R&D subsidies on R&D input and output of German firms. We distinguish between the direct impact of subsidies on R&D investment and the indirect effect on innovation output measured by patent applications. We disentangle the productivity of purely privately financed R&D and additional R&D investment induced by the public incentive scheme. For this, a treatment-effect analysis is conducted in a first step. The results are implemented into the estimation of a patent production function in a second step. It turns out that both purely privately financed R&D and publicly induced R&D show a positive effect on patent outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests the additional information content of price-earnings ratios, with respect to Tobin’sq, in explaining firms’ investment behaviour. While Tobin’sqdescribes the expected future earnings related to those projected by thebook value, the price-earnings ratio compares future growth of earnings based on the projection ofcurrent earnings. In other words, a high price-earnings ratio might indicate that investors are willing to rely on future earnings growth, even though current earnings are low. By using an unbalanced panel of about 500 listed firms from Germany over the period 1987–2007, we find that including the price-earnings ratio in the investment equation does not change the explanatory power of Tobin’sq. Most notably, the price-earnings ratio exerts a positive and significant impact on investment. These results are robust to the inclusion of a measure of the firm’s internal funds and of fixed effects and also to the use of different estimators. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study uses tailor-made enterprise-level data for 2008–2010 from various sources for firms from manufacturing industries to test for the link between credit constraints, measured by a credit rating score provided by a leading credit rating agency, and imports in Germany for the first time. We find empirical evidence that a better credit rating score is positively related to extensive margins of import – firms with a better score have a higher probability to import, they import more goods and they source from more countries of origin. The intensive margin of imports – the share of imports in total sales – is found not to be related to credit constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a tailor-made newly available data set for enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany to investigate for the first time the links between export diversification over destination countries and goods on the one hand and the profitability of the exporting firms on the other hand. We find that profits tend to be larger in firms with less diversified export sales over goods and in firms with more diversified export sales over destination countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We employ an error correction model of leverage to test the trade-off and pecking order theories of capital structure for firms in the UK, France and Germany. The error correction framework extends the partial adjustment model by explicitly modelling changes in target leverage and past deviations from such target as determinants of firms' dynamic leverage adjustment process. We also augment our empirical models to test the pecking order theory. Using appropriate and advanced dynamic panel data methods, we find that UK, French and German firms adjust towards target leverage quickly in both the partial adjustment and error correction models, which is consistent with the trade-off theory. We further show that the trade-off theory explains these firms' capital structure decisions better than the pecking order theory in the models nesting the two theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a sample of 1485 funded firms in Germany, we analyse the driving forces of Venture Capitalist (VC) syndication and try to disentangle the circumstances under which VCs engage in collaboration with partners. The results indicate that syndication is more pronounced for younger funded firms. For firms where products are far from commercialization, the risks that investors face are more severe. With respect to disentangling the role of diversification and managerial resource motives we analyse the impact of syndication activities on the industry concentration in VC portfolios. The results indicate that (all else equal) more syndication leads to more pronounced concentration on certain industries. These findings are in line with the argument that VCs involve partners to leverage upon their idiosyncratic skills and knowledge to either improve deal selection and/or provide a better quality of managerial advice to the funded firm rather than simply using syndication to diversify portfolios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we analyse stylized facts for Germany's business cycle at the firm level. Based on longitudinal firm-level data from the Bundesbank's balance sheet statistics covering, on average, 55 000 firms per year from 1971 to 1998, we estimate transition probabilities of a firm in a certain real sales growth regime switching to another regime in the next period, e.g. whether a firm that has witnessed a high growth rate is likely to stay in a regime of high growth or is bound to switch to a regime of low growth in the subsequent period. We find that these probabilities depend on the business cycle position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]