January 2025, for the first time in the postwar history of Germany's national parliament, a mainstream political party (the Christian Democratic Union) relied on the support of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to pass a motion. This prompted intense public debate as many Germans worried that...

Nachdem im Deutschen Bundestag Ende Januar 2025 erstmals eine politische Mehrheit mit den Stimmen der AfD zustande kam, sind viele Deutsche besorgt, dass es bald weitergehende Kooperation mit der AfD geben könnte. Vor diesem Hintergrund untersucht unsere Studie den Stand der Brandmauer in...

To fully understand why the European Union is defined by its motto United in diversity, one must look at its regions and cities. This complex network of communities, old and new, full of collective and personal stories, is the beating heart of Europe. As a new political cycle starts for the...

To fully understand why the European Union is defined by its motto United in diversity, one must look at its regions and cities. This complex network of communities, old and new, full of collective and personal stories, is the beating heart of Europe. As a new political cycle starts for the...

Traditional urban policy focuses mainly on redevelopment measures. Germany's Social City programme incorporates urban regeneration with support to local communities in deprived neighbourhoods. We use microdata on household characteristics from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and microdata...

Small-scale federal democracies depend on the active participation of individuals in local political office. Both anecdotal evidence and empirical studies across Western democracies indicate a growing difficulty in recent decades to recruit candidates for municipal offices. This study examines...

According to various growth theories, technology is the main factor driving long-run growth and economic convergence. Yet this process is constrained by the features of a country's institutional background. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between economic convergence and...

In dem Buch wird eine vergleichende Analyse von Krisen-Governance in den Ländern Frankreich, Vereinigtes Königreich (England), Schweden, Polen und Deutschland am Beispiel der Coronapandemie präsentiert. Dabei werden die Rolle der Kommunen als Resilienz-fördernde Basisinstitutionen und ihre...

This study argues that urbanization changed the relationship between the occupation of candidates running in parliamentary elections and their electoral success. To identify local-level variation in urbanization, we leverage exogenous changes to the boundaries of electoral constituencies in the...

Bedingt durch den Mix aus gestiegenen Zinsen und gestiegenen Baukosten befindet sich der Wohnungsneubau in Deutschland in einer sehr schwierigen Lage. Darüber hinaus wird die Lage erschwert durch Unsicherheiten über zukünftige Mietregulierungen, Klimaschutzmaßnahmen, Stadtentwicklungstrends...

Do young politicians prioritize other types of municipal spending than old politicians? We study this question using hand-collected candidate-level data on municipal elections (1996-2020), along with detailed administrative data on municipal spending in Bavaria. Our identification strategy makes...

Intermediate cities have started competing for capital, thus becoming privileged sites for economic growth and policy formulation in agricultural, industrial, and service production areas. However, this process, driven by speculative urban development, exacerbates problems such as socio-spatial...

African cities are increasingly seen as key to unlocking national structural transformation and inclusive growth, as they tend to host the majority of the non-productive and informal labour force; attract the lion's share of domestic investment in non-productive sectors; and host different...

Which Americans experience the worst infrastructure? What are the costs of living with that infrastructure? We measure road roughness throughout America using vertical acceleration data from Uber rides across millions of American roads. Our measure correlates strongly and positively with other...

This study argues that urbanization changed the relationship between the occupation of candidates running in parliamentary elections and their electoral success. To identify local-level variation in urbanization, we leverage exogenous changes to the boundaries of electoral constituencies in the...

In the past, both researchers and policymakers have often underlined the important role cities have to play in reaching the objectives of the Paris Agreement and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Meanwhile, city networks have become increasingly active in approaching international...

The ordinary spectrum is restricted in its applications, since it is based on the second-order moments (auto- and cross-covariances). Alternative approaches to spectrum analysis have been investigated based on other measures of dependence. One such approach was developed for univariate time...