Migration restrictions are a hotly debated topic in the current refugee crisis in Europe. This paper investigates the long-term effect of a restrictive migration policy on regional development. The analysis is based on the large-scale expulsion of Germans from Cen-tral and Eastern Europe after...

We investigate the role of entrepreneurship culture and the historical knowledge base of a region on current levels of new business formation in innovative industries. The analysis is for German regions and covers the time period 1907-2014. We find a pronounced positive relationship between high...

We empirically analyze the relationship between income inequality and individual preferences for public redistribution, focusing on intra-household income inequality between spouses. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we find that both one's own earned income and earned...

This paper investigates whether the relationship between a person 's occupational status and well -being differs across countries with varying institutional contexts. We find that the relationship between job - and life satisfaction of self -employed people as well as of paid employees varies...

There is a research gap with respect to understanding the role of entrepreneurial culture and tradition for actual start-up behaviour. We combine historical self-employment data (entrepreneurial tradition) with a psychological measure for entrepreneurial attitudes (entrepreneurial culture). The...

Could the industrialization reduce social inequalities? We use the rise of office employment in the early 20th century as a historical experiment to study the effect of technological change on labor market access for vulnerable groups. In regions with industries that were strongly connected to...

Humans make decisions jointly with others. They share responsibility for the outcome with their interaction partners. Today, more and more often the partner in a decision is not another human but, instead, a machine. Here we ask whether the type of the partner, machine or human, affects our...

The impact of product and production standards on trade flows is of critical relevance for developing countries aiming at a higher participation in world trade. While economic theory suggests that the effect of standards on trade can entail two opposing forces, acting either as non-tariff...

The fall in risk free interest rates since the 1980s has mostly been described as being induced by factors that push down interest rates from the demand side. This paper contributes to the literature by adding a view of the supply side, namely that interest has to be earned first, before it can...

This paper employs a structural VAR framework with sign restrictions to estimate the effects of unconventional monetary policies of the European Central Bank since the Global Financial Crisis, mainly in their effectiveness towards bank lending. Using a variable for newly issued credit instead of...