We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on what makes German regions grow. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a trimodal...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of transportation infrastructure quantity and quality on regional economic production. We exploit an extensive panel dataset on the German county level (N=401), expressing the capital value and condition of highways between 2007 and 2016, to estimate a...

Using firm-level panel data from the German cost structure survey over the period 1992 to 2000, our empirical analysis shows that firms that increased material inputs relative to internal labor costs performed better in terms of gross operating surplus than other firms. However, firms that...

This paper analyzes the allocation of workers to jobs and the wage distribution in Germany. Our main contribution is to reconcile prominent empirical models of wage dispersion (Abowd et al., 1999; Card et al., 2013) with theoretical sorting models (Shimer and Smith, 2000; Eeckhout and Kircher, 2011;...

Concentrated ownership of large listed companies is widespread throughout the world, and Germany is typical in this respect. This paper proposes a method of distinguishing empirically between the beneficial and harmful effects of ownership concentration, and applies it to German data. The...

The East Asian miracle was real. Prior to the 1997 economic and currency crises, Asian NICs Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan achieved remarkable annual GDP growth. In these countries the overall economic performance was significantly determined by the industrial development triggered by...

We examine the introduction of a gender quota law in Germany, mandating a minimum 30% of the underrepresented gender on the supervisory boards of a particular type of firms. We exploit the fact that Germany has a two-tier corporate system consisting of the affected supervisory boards and...