Product Policy and the East-West Productivity Gap: Evidence from German Manufacturing Firms

After 20 years of transition from an economy integrated in an exchange scheme of planned economies towards an open market economy based on the ideas of competition, we ask whether East German firms succeeded in finding their place in the international division of labour. We concentrate on the question, to what extent they have caught up with the productivity level of their Western counterparts of similar size and sector and how this productivity difference is related to changes in their product policy. We analyse these questions with a unique data set provided by Statistics Germany that contains both product policy and productivity information for individual manufacturers from both parts of the country. Using a decomposition approach suggested by Nopo (2008) as a nonparametric extension of the widely-used Oaxaca-Blinder methodology (Blinder 1973; Oaxaca 1973) we find that the time span from 1995 - 2004 has two component periods: a period of adaptation from 1995 to 2001and a period of branding from 2002 to 2004. The initial period is characterized by a smaller share of Eastern firms that modify their product range and by a large productivity gap of Eastern Non-Modifiers if compared to Western Non-Modifiers of comparable size and sector. The evidence for the second period, however, points to a more active and established role of East German manufacturers: more of them alter their product range and step up their productivity performance

Regional Patterns of Intangible Capital, Agglomeration Effects and Localised Spillovers in Germany

We use a large micro-dataset to assess the importance of intangible capital - organisation, R&D and ICT capital - for the economic performance of establishments and regions in Germany. In 2003 self-produced intangible capital accounted for more than one fifth of the total capital stock of estab-lishments. More than half of the intangible capital is R&D capital. This high proportion is mainly due to a relatively strong and research-intensive manufacturing sector in Germany. At the regional level, we find descriptive evidence for a positive relationship between intangible capital and the economic performance of regions. This is true both for the level of economic activities and for growth. The results of cross-sectional regressions for the years from 1999 to 2003 indicate that dou-bling the intangible capital intensity of establishments increases the average wage levels by one percent. Regarding the regional economic environment of establishments, we find that the substan-tial net advantages of agglomeration have more to do with broad knowledge and diversity than with regional clustering and specialisation. Separate regressions for the wage levels of non-intangible workers show very similar results. These workers can share the rents of the activities of intangible workers. Thus, intangible capital generates positive externalities not only at the regional level, but also at the level of establishments

What Drives the Productive Efficiency of a Firm? The Importance of Industry, Location, R&D, and Size

This paper investigates the factors that explain the level and dynamics of manufacturing firm productive efficiency. In our empirical analysis, we use a unique sample of about 39,000 firms in 256 industries from the German Cost Structure Census over the years 1992-2005. We estimate the efficiencies of the firms and relate them to firm-specific and environmental factors. We find that (1) about half the model's explanatory power is due to industry effects, (2) firm size accounts for another 20 percent, and (3) location of headquarters explains approximately 15 percent. Interestingly, most other firm characteristics, such as R&D intensity, outsourcing activities, or the number of owners, have extremely little explanatory power. Surprisingly, our findings suggest that higher R&D intensity is associated with being less efficient, though higher R&D spending increases a firm's efficiency over time

Energy use patterns in German industry: Evidence from plant-level data

Summary This paper analyzes energy use and CO2 emissions of more than 78 000 German industrial plants between 1995 and 2006. It is the first study to exploit exceptionally rich energy data that were recently matched to official micro datasets. We document that both energy use and intensity are highly dispersed across plants. When isolating the between-sector variation in energy intensity, there is a strong positive correlation with energy use, CO2 emissions and emission intensity. Yet there is no evidence that the scale of an industry determines its energy intensity. The dispersion of energy use across plants of a given sector, normalized by the median, is positively correlated with that of gross output, but not with the median energy use. Similarly, there is no evidence that the median energy intensity is correlated with the within- sector dispersion of energy intensity or with that of CO2 emissions. Looking at the fuel mix across sectors, we find that more energy intensive industries rely more on fuels other than electricity, although the variability among plants in those industries is extremely high. We also demonstrate that average fuel shares are sensitive to the skewness of the underlying distribution and recommend the use of median fuel shares for better representativeness.</jats:p