Governance & Structure
Governance & Structure The IWH Center for Business and Productivity Dynamism (IWH-CBPD), led by Center Chief Javier Miranda , hosts the CompNet Network and its related activities.…
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Halle Institute for Economic Research
Labour Markets: Sharpened Focus With the new name, the Department places its research focus on labour economics at the centre. Core topics remain structural change, wages,…
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Centre for Evidence-based Policy Advice
Centre for Evidence-based Policy Advice (IWH-CEP) The Centre for Evidence-based Policy Advice (IWH-CEP) of the IWH was founded in 2014. It is a platform that bundles and…
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Archive
Media Response Archive 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 December 2021 IWH: Ausblick auf Wirtschaftsjahr 2022 in Sachsen mit Bezug auf IWH-Prognose zu Ostdeutschland: "Warum Sachsens…
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Research Clusters
Three Research Clusters Each IWH research group is assigned to a topic-oriented research cluster. The clusters are not separate organisational units, but rather bundle the…
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Research Articles
Research Articles Explore cutting-edge research based on CompNet’s micro-aggregated firm-level data and related analytical tools. These articles cover empirical and theoretical…
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Economic Outlook
IWH Economic Outlook 2026 Slight Upturn on the Horizon, Structural Problems Remain December 11, 2025 As the year draws to a close, it remains uncertain whether the German economy…
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Essays on Firms and Market Performance
Tommaso Bighelli
PhD Thesis, db-thueringen,
2024
Abstract
In Chapter 1, I combine longitudinal administrative firm-level data from Germany with 8,000 local tax changes for identification to show that local tax hikes (cuts) increase (decrease) the local manufacturing share. Firm-level results reveal that this is due to wage, employment, firm entry, and labor productivity in the service sector being more responsive to a tax shock than in manufacturing. With this evidence in mind, I calibrate a two-sector model with heterogeneous firms and profit tax to show that, owing to different structural parameters, a corporate tax cut disproportionately benefits service firms, contributing to the sectoral reallocation from manufacturing to service. In Chapter 2, we derive a European Herfindahl-Hirschman concentration index from 15 micro-aggregated country datasets. We show that European concentration rose due to a reallocation of economic activity towards large and concentrated industries. Over the same period, productivity gains from an increasing allocative efficiency of the European market accounted for 50% of European productivity growth while markups stayed constant. Using country-industry variation, we show that changes in concentration are positively associated with changes in productivity and allocative efficiency. This holds across most sectors and countries and supports the notion that rising concentration in Europe reflects a more efficient market environment rather than weak competition and rising market power. In chapter 3, We study the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and related policy support on productivity. We employ an extensive micro-distributed exercise to access otherwise unavailable individual data on firm performance and government subsidies. Our cross-country evidence for five EU countries shows that the pandemic led to a significant short-term decline in aggregate productivity and the direct support to firms had only a limited positive effect on productivity developments.
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East Germany
The Nasty Gap 30 years after unification: Why East Germany is still 20% poorer than the West Dossier In a nutshell The East German economic convergence process is hardly…
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Policy Output
Reports › CompNet’s flagship and special reports provide in-depth, data-driven analysis on productivity, competitiveness, and related economic trends, using the latest CompNet…
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