This paper examines the long-term impact of West German television exposure on smoking behavior in East Germany, with a focus on gender-specific responses. Using data from 1989 and 2002 and leveraging quasi-random variation in West German TV signal availability across East German regions, we...

We investigate the causal relationship between inventor migration and regional innovation in the context of the large-scale migration shock from East to West Germany between World War II and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Leveraging a newly constructed, century-spanning dataset on...

We investigate the causal relationship between inventor migration and regional innovation in the context of the large-scale migration shock from East to West Germany between World War II and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Leveraging a newly constructed, century-spanning dataset on...

German reunification in 1990 marked the first sudden integration of a socialist and capitalist economy. Despite East Germany’s (EG) economic catch-up with West Ger- many (WG), the integration remains unfinished, as indicated by per capita output in EG still being about one-third lower. To...

Couples in which wives have more education than their husbands have been found to be more likely than other couples to divorce. But this relationship varies across time and place. We compare the relationship between spouses' relative education and marital dissolution across four birth cohorts...

Previous international research suggests that women are on average more risk averse than men. This gives rise to the question of whether the gender gap in risk attitudes is shaped by the social environment. We address this question by examining risk attitudes among East and West Germans. Even...

In a context where improved employment outcomes entail relocating to a new destination, how does information from former coworkers alter workers’ labor migration decisions? We explore this question using the unique backdrop of German reunification in the early 1990s. For former workers of the...

Der scharfe Ost-West-Unterschied, welcher in der kartografischen Darstellung regionaler Wahlergebnisse zum Vorschein tritt, verändert sich deutlich, sobald man regionalspezifische Charakteristika berücksichtigt. Die höhere Präferenz für die AfD ist nach Berücksichtigung der Merkmale...

We investigate the wage assimilation of East Germans who migrated to West Germany after reunification (1990-1999). We compare their wage assimilation to that of ethnic German immigrants from Eastern Bloc countries and international immigrants to West Germany who arrived at the same time. The...

We investigate the wage assimilation of East Germans who migrated to West Germany after reunification (1990-1999). We compare their wage assimilation to that of ethnic German immigrants from Eastern Bloc countries and international immigrants to West Germany who arrived at the same time. The...

This study uses administrative data from the German Pension Insurance and combines a wide range of regional data sources in order to shine light on regional variation in the relationship between life expectancy and lifetime earnings in Germany. Moreover, it advances understanding of which place...

An immigrant-native wage gap can result from various mechanisms. This paper studies the relevance of cultural similarity. We investigate the wage assimilation of East Germans who migrated to West Germany after unification (1990-1999). We compare their wage assimilation to that of international...

The unification of the East and West German states in 1990 initiated the integration of two distinct innovation systems. In this process, the poorly functioning socialist system of East Germany adopted the formal institutions and organization of West Germany, a western-style market economy. We...

The division of Germany into a free-market West and a socialist East that followed the military defeat in spring 1945 induced thousands of East German companies to relocate to the West in the following years. This exogenous mass exodus allows us to identify the motives for the choice of firm...

Employment among mothers has been rising in recent decades, although mothers of young children often work fewer hours than other women do. Parallel to this trend, approval of maternal employment has increased, albeit not evenly across groups. However, differences in attitudes remain unexplored...

We provide novel evidence on the impact of a child's health shock on parental labor market outcomes. To identify the causal effect, we leverage long panels of high-quality Finnish and Norwegian administrative data and exploit variation in the timing of the health shock. We do this by comparing...

The purpose of this paper is two fold. First, to estimate, using structural methods, the extent to which capital flows undermined West German monetary policy during the Bretton Woods years 1960 to 1970 and second, to show that earlier reduced form estimates of the capital-account offset...

This paper investigates the sources of wage growth over the life cycle, where individuals have the possibility to acquire vocational training at the start of their career. Wage growth is determined by sectoral and firm mobility, unobserved ability and the accumulation of human capital. Workers...

Can television have a mitigating effect on xenophobia? To explore this question, we investigate a natural experiment in which individuals in some regions of East Germany could not—due to their geographic location—consume West German television until 1989. By analyzing survey data from the...

A political miracle occurred when Germany was reunited, and at first glance an economic miracle has followed. Real incomes in the east have now reached the western level, and investment per capita has been much higher than in the west. However, every third deutschmark spent in the east has been...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an increase in mortality in 2020 with a resultant decrease in life expectancy in most countries around the world. In Germany, the reduction in life expectancy at birth between 2019 and 2020 was comparatively small, at -0.20 years. The decrease was stronger among men...

We develop a general equilibrium model of frictional labor reallocation across firms and regions, and use it to quantify the aggregate and distributional effects of spatial frictions that hinder worker mobility across regions in Germany. The model leverages matched employer-employee data to...

Social norms have been put forward as prominent explanations for the changing labour supply decisions of women. This paper studies the intergenerational formation of these norms, examining how they affect subsequent female labour supply decisions, taking into account not only the early...

Using data on trust and trustworthiness from the 1990 wave of the World Values Survey, I first investigate a model of the extent of tax cheating and the size of government that recognizes the interdependence of the two. The results reveal that tax cheating is lower in countries that exhibit more...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficiency of the East German economy at the firm level using an unbalanced panel over the transition period 1994 to 1998. We adopt a translog stochastic frontier model to estimate technical efficiency in eastern and western Germany. The results...

Survey data from the United States, West Germany and East Germany are analyzed to compare individual attitudes towards political redistribution in each country. In West Germany the homo oeconomicus effect, the social rivalry effect and the public values effect simultaneously retain an...

In 1994, Blanchflower and Oswald reported that they have found an "empirical law of economics" - the Wage Curve. According to their empirical results, the elasticity of wages with respect to regional unemployment is -0.1. This holds especially for the Anglo-Saxon countries. Our paper reconsiders...

Using data from the social survey ALLBUS for West Germany in the period 1980 to 2006, this paper demonstrates that union members are on average older than non-unionized employees. The probability of being unionized shows the inverted U-shaped pattern in age conjectured by Blanchflower (BJIR...

An empirical analysis of various waves of the ALLBUS social survey shows that union density fell substantially in West Germany from 1980 to 2000. Such a negative trend can be observed for men and women and for different groups of the workforce. Repeated crosssectional analyses suggest that a...

An empirical analysis of various waves of the ALLBUS social survey shows that the level and the structure of unionization has become more and more similar in eastern and western Germany in the period 1992 to 2000. The originally high level of union density in eastern Germany has dropped below...

We construct a unique data set to analyze whether or not a large temporary shock had an impact on German city growth and city size distribution. Following recent work by Davis and Weinstein (2001) on Japan, we take the strategic bombing of German cities during WWII as our example of such a...