Foreign-Owned Firms in the German Labour Market

Rolf Jungnickel and Dietmar Keller

No 26149, Discussion Paper Series from Hamburg Institute of International Economics

Abstract: Compared to other Western European countries, Germany was less successful in attracting FDI in the 1990s. The falling behind in inward-FDI should be no problem if foreign-owned firms (FoFs) were only substitutes for indigenous firms. However, to the extent they differ significantly in terms of performance and structure, FoFs could be an interesting target group of economic policy. We empirically test three hypotheses: FoFs enjoy a productivity advantage over purely nationally operating firms but not - or less so - over multinationals headquartered in Germany (H1). The demand for qualified labour is higher in FoFs compared to German firms (H2). FoFs show a more flexible conduct on the labour market than German-owned firms; they are less integrated in the traditional national labour market system (H3). Our analysis is based on the establishment panel of the Nuremberg Institute for Employment Research (IAB). The data largely support H1 and H2, whereas there is hardly evidence of a particular flexibility in the FoFs' conduct on the labour market.

Keywords: International Relations/Trade; Labor and Human Capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31
Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/26149/files/dp030233.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:hwwadp:26149

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.26149

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from Hamburg Institute of International Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search (aesearch@umn.edu).