1. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 08-136 // 2008

    Oil and Unemployment in Germany

    The recent years have been marked by massive price movements in resource markets. Particularly record high prices for oil have been reached. Although until late 2008, oil prices have decreased from nearly 150 to…

  2. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 08-135 // 2008

    The Creative Class, Bohemians and Local Labor Market Performance – A Micro-data Panel Study for Germany 1975-2004

    Richard Florida’s thought-provoking concept of the Creative Class can be seen a fruitful contribution for our understanding of regional economic development because it stresses the importance of professional…

  3. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 08-134 // 2008

    The Impact of Innovation on Employment in Small and Medium Enterprises with Different Growth Rates

    Using information on almost 12.000 firms this article examines the impact of innovation on employment growth in innovating small and medium enterprises. In contrast to existing studies, which typically use the…

  4. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 08-133 // 2008

    Employment Adjustments on the Internal and External Labour Market – An Empirical Study with Personnel Records of a German Company

    Firms are affected by the product demand. This leads to employment adjustments. On the internal labour market there exist two prominent possibilities, changes of working hours, especially overtime, and…

  5. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 08-132 // 2008

    Can a Task-Based Approach Explain the Recent Changes in the German Wage Structure?

    Even though wage inequality in West Germany started to rise at the top of the wage distribution in the 1980s, this rise was delayed for about ten years at the bottom. Our paper investigates the changes in the…

  6. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 08-131 // 2008

    Crime and the Labour Market: Evidence from a Survey of Inmates

    Economists think that unemployment is an important cause for crime. From the theoretical point of view, this belief seems to be reasonable, since, according to the standard economic theory of crime by Nobel…

  7. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 08-130 // 2008

    Firm Heterogeneity and Wages Under Different Bargaining Regimes: Does a Centralised Union Care for Low-productivity Firms?

    In recent decades, German industry-level bargaining has often been blamed for the deterioration of firms’ competitiveness, as centrally negotiated wages are perceived to be particularly harmful to those firms…

  8. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 08-129 // 2008

    Do Older Workers Lower IT-Enabled Productivity? Firm-Level Evidence from Germany

    The role of information and communication technologies (ICT) as a driving force for productivity and competitiveness is in the meanwhile well recognized. A look at the country level, however, reveals that the…

  9. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 08-127 // 2008

    ICT, Consulting and Innovative Capabilities

    Over the last decade, industrialized economies have experienced a dramatic increase in their expenditures on information and communication technologies (ICT) and there is broad evidence indicating that the…