License trade with COMECON states

The present article, which is based on some chapters of the author’s doctorate thesis¹, investigates why the trade in licenses between the Federal Republic of Germany and state-trading countries is at present still negligible. For this purpose the policy of the state-trading countries in regard to licenses is explained, the causes which impede this trade are pointed out and suggestions made for their removal.     

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On the microstructure of the german export boom: Evidence from establishment panel data, 1995–2002

This paper uses an unbalanced panel data set for exporting firms from manufacturing industries in one German federal state, Lower Saxony, to investigate the microstructure of the recent export boom. Looking at data for 1995/96–2001/02 it is demonstrated that a considerable number of plants start and stop exporting in each year, but that most of the export dynamics is due to positive and negative changes of exports in plants that continue exporting. A small fraction made of 4–5 percent of all exporting plants is responsible for around 70 to 80 percent of the gross increase in exports. Firms with expanding and contracting exports are found simultaneously in all broad sectors, technology classes and firm size classes. Patterns of export behavior differ widely between the plants over the periods investigated. JEL no. F14, E32     

Modularity and intellectual property protection

Modularity is a means of partitioning technical knowledge about a product or process. When state‐sanctioned intellectual property (IP) rights are ineffective or costly to enforce, modularity can be used to hide information and thus protect IP. We investigate the impact of modularity on IP protection by formally modeling the threat of expropriation by agents. The principal has three options to address this threat: trust, licensing, and paying agents to stay loyal. We show how the principal can influence the value of these options by modularizing the system and by hiring clans of agents, thus exploiting relationships among them. Extensions address screening and signaling in hiring, the effects of an imperfect legal system, and social norms of fairness. We illustrate our arguments with examples from practice.© 2014 The Authors. Strategic Management Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

The exporter productivity premium along the productivity distribution: evidence from quantile regression with nonadditive firm fixed effects

A vast literature on the international activities of heterogeneous firms finds the existence of a positive exporter productivity premium. On average, exporting firms are more productive than firms that sell on the national market only. The Melitz (Econometrica 71:1695–1725, 2003) model, however, has implications for not only mean differences but also differences in the distribution of productivity. Furthermore, exporting firms may be different from non-exporting firms for reasons that are not included in the Melitz model. We believe that conditioning on firm fixed effects and studying the distribution of productivity are both necessary for empirical tests of the Melitz model. This paper is the first to employ a new quantile estimation technique for panel data introduced in Powell (Did the economic stimulus payments of 2008 reduce labor supply? Evidence from quantile panel data estimation. RAND Corporation Publications Department, Santa Monica, 2014). We find that the premium is positive at all productivity levels, but highest at the lowest quantiles. These results support theoretical models which suggest that there is a division in productivity between exporters and non-exporters.     

Das Mindestlohngesetz — Hoffnungen und Befürchtungen

The German government plans to introduce a minimum wage from 2015. This must be understood as a response to the decline in collective bargaining coverage and the marked increase in employment in the low-wage sector. The authors discuss how many workers are affected by this new regulation and whether the minimum wage is too high in relation to the average wage of workers (Kaitz index). They assume that the introduction of a minimum wage in Germany can have a number of effects. It is not possible to forecast all the reactions and behaviour of market participants to handle higher wages and goods prices. Some authors warn that these measures are significant labour market interventions that could have adverse employment effects. They recommend allowing more exemptions from the minimum wage law than intended by the government, especially for young employees and student apprentices. Other authors hope that minimum wages would help to strengthen collective bargaining and stabilise wages. Some authors emphasise that there should be a careful evaluation of the economic effects by scientists.