In this study, establishment-level employment effects of investment grants in Germany are estimated. In addition to the quantitative effects, I provide empirical evidence of funding effects on different aspects of employment quality (earnings, qualifications, and job security) for the period 2004 to 2020. The database combines project-level treatment data, establishment-level information on firm characteristics and employee structure, and regional information at the district level. For the estimations, I combine the difference-in-differences approach of Callaway and Sant’Anna (J Econom 2252: 200–230, 2021) with ties matching at the cohort level. The estimations yield positive effects on the number of employees, but point to contradicting effects of investment grants on different aspects of employment quality.

This paper provides new causal evidence on how patent allowances affect firms and their employees based on quasi-random assignment of patent applications to examiners. Exploiting employer-employee records with newly linked German firm data and web-scraped patent documents, we show that patent-induced shocks reduce firm exit, improve productivity, and increase wages, with rent-sharing elasticities between 0.10 and 0.21. Wage gains are broadly observed across occupational tasks, with high heterogeneity: managers benefit disproportionately in publicly traded firms, whereas broader wage increases accrue to workers in non-traded firms. Our findings highlight the role of institutional features and firm organization in shaping how rents are shared.

Firm training is widely regarded as crucial for protecting workers from automation, yet there is a lack of empirical evidence to support this belief. Using internationally harmonized data from over 90,000 workers across 37 industrialized countries, we construct an individual-level measure of automation risk based on tasks performed at work. Our analysis reveals substantial within-occupation variation in automation risk, overlooked by existing occupation-level measures. To assess whether firm training mitigates automation risk, we exploit within-occupation and within-industry variation. Additionally, we employ entropy balancing to re-weight workers without firm training based on a rich set of background characteristics, including tested numeracy skills as a proxy for unobserved ability. We find that training reduces workers’ automation risk by 3.8 percentage points, equivalent to 8% of the average automation risk. The training-induced reduction in automation risk accounts for 15% of the wage returns to firm training. Firm training is effective in reducing automation risk and increasing wages across nearly all countries, underscoring the external validity of our findings. Training is similarly effective across gender, age, and education groups, suggesting widely shared benefits rather than gains concentrated in specific demographic segments.

Many countries and regions remain below the level of economic activity of the world’s most advanced economies. Some countries form growth clubs, some are stuck in the middle-income trap, and some stay on a very low level of economic activity. Although this situation is well documented on the country level, there is less evidence at the sub-national level within countries. We estimate county-level capital stocks and price indices and provide a comprehensive county-level data set for Germany. We find no evidence of convergence across all counties even if we condition on important drivers of long-term growth such as physical and human capital accumulation. Instead, we identify five convergence clubs, using endogenous clustering. We analyze differences in growth paths and describe the identified clusters based on variations in contributions of capital, labor, and total factor productivity to economic growth. Additionally, we examine the role of migration for regional development and find that net migration has in particular contributed to growth in richer regions.

Spatial segregation of low- and high-wage workers is a persistent economic issue with broad social implications. Using social security data and an AKM wage decomposition, this paper examines spatial wage inequality in West Germany. Spatial inequality in log wages rose sharply between 1998 and 2008, mainly due to increased variance in worker pay premiums across regions (48%) and stronger positive spatial assortative matching of workers and establishments (40%), i.e. colocation. Changes in establishment wage premia are mostly unrelated to rising colocation whereas labor mobility even reduced it. Instead, growth in worker pay premiums among stayers was concentrated in regions where high-wage workers and high-wage establishments were overrepresented already in the 1990s and, thus, magnified pre-existing colocation leading to ‘colocation without relocation’. Germany’s rising trade surplus, especially with Eastern Europe, boosted stayers’ worker pay premiums in those ex-ante high-wage regions and fully explains rising colocation.

Using brand-level sales data from Chinese e-commerce platforms, this study examines how geopolitical tensions affect multinational brands operating in China. Merging these sales data with a U.S.–China tension index, we use panel regressions and local projections to show that rising tensions significantly reduce the market share of U.S. brands in China relative to brands from other countries, with the effects persisting for up to 12 months. An event study employing a difference-in-differences framework, centered on brand-specific incidents of political tension with China, reveals similar market share declines among affected brands, highlighting consumer sentiment as a key transmission channel.

The effects of private equity buyouts on employment, productivity, and job reallocation vary tremendously with macroeconomic and credit conditions, across private equity groups, and by type of buyout. We reach this conclusion by examining the most extensive database of U.S. buyouts ever compiled, encompassing thousands of buyout targets from 1980 to 2013 and millions of control firms. Employment shrinks 12% over two years after buyouts of publicly listed firms—on average, and relative to control firms—but expands 15% after buyouts of privately held firms. Postbuyout productivity gains at target firms are large on average and much larger yet for deals executed amid tight credit conditions. A postbuyout tightening of credit conditions or slowing of gross domestic product growth curtails employment growth and intrafirm job reallocation at target firms. We also show that buyout effects differ across the private equity groups that sponsor buyouts, and these differences persist over time at the group level. Rapid upscaling in deal flow at the group level brings lower employment growth at target firms. We relate these findings to theories of private equity that highlight agency problems at portfolio firms and within the private equity industry itself.

Based on a sufficient statistics approach, we show how the state of technology of European industries relative to the rest of the world can be empirically assessed in a way that is simple in terms of computation, parsimonious in terms of data requirements, but still comprehensive in terms of information. The lack of systematic cross-industry correlation between export specialization and technological advantage suggests that standard measures of revealed comparative advantage only imperfectly capture a country’s technological prowess due to the concurrent influences of factor prices, market size, markups, firm selection and market share reallocation. These findings offer policy insights relevant to the EU’s external competitiveness debate, echoing several recommendations from the Draghi report. Achieving export specialization in key sectors requires more than just technological superiority.

This study estimates the firm-level employment effects of investment grants in Germany. In addition to the average treatment effect on the treated, we examine discrimination in the funding rules as a potential source of effect heterogeneity. We combine a staggered difference-in-differences approach with a matching procedure at the cohort level. The findings reveal a positive effect of investment grants on employment development. The subsample analyses yield strong evidence for heterogeneous effects based on firm characteristics and the economic environment. They highlight the responsibility of the local funding authorities to clarify ex ante which goals of a funding programme are most important in their regions.

We examine the survival prospects, employment profiles, and patient outcomes at private equity (PE)-acquired hospitals. Target hospitals maintain their survival rates while significantly reducing employment and wage expenditures. The number of core medical workers drops temporarily, but returns to its pre-acquisition level in the long run. However, administrative job and wage cuts persist over the long term, particularly at previously nonprofit hospitals. Using proprietary insurance claims data, we find no significant changes in patient demographics or inpatient prices at PE-acquired hospitals. While patient satisfaction declines, there is no evidence of increased patient mortality or readmission rates at PE-acquired hospitals.