Questions about the advantages and disadvantages of sending young children to formal day care ("Kindertageseinrichtungen") have always greatly concerned parents and led to intense, if not always well informed, policy debate. Two issues have been foremost. One is whether young children removed...

Influential economists, like Bruno S. Frey and Richard Layard, are advocating that the standard approach in economics of inferring utility from changes in consumption and leisure should be augmented or replaced by use of subjective measures. But psychologists claim that adult life satisfaction...

Without a birth certificate, no identity card can be issued and without identity card, there is no access to formal financial services. This link seems to be trivial in industrialized countries, where the ability of the individual to participate in economic life is rarely hindered by a lack of...

Russian energy production has increased substantially in recent years, with production of natural gas now actually exceeding the levels reached in the early 1990s. The growth in energy production has gone hand in hand with a rise in Russian energy exports. The European Union is an extremely...

In 2006 about 155 000 Germans left their country - more than ever before apart from the postwar wave of emigration in the 1950s. However, many recent German emigrants return to their home country. Although the question of why this rise has occurred is now arousing much attention from the general...

A joint research project at the European University Viadrina, DIW Berlin and the Polish Academy of Science has investigated how companies assess their locational conditions and whether there is a relationship between location attributes and the company performance. In both countries the majority...

The proportion of middle income earners in Germany has shrunk significantly in recent years: from 62 percent of the total population in the year 2000 to only 54 percent in 2006. Correspondingly, the proportion of the population at the margins of the income distribution has increased as well,...

In the course of increasing internationalisation of the German economy, growth in export can also be expected for the German service sector. However, there has only been limited information about the export behaviour of German service companies so far. This gap can be closed to some extent by...

For years, the difference between the gross hourly earnings of women and of men has remained constant for German white-collar employees at about 30 percent. It is obvious that regional factors play an important role in explaining this difference. In rural areas, the gender pay gap is especially...

In the midst of the international financial crisis, the German federal government passed the Risk Limitation Act in autumn 2007. In spring 2008 the Bundestag has finally decided on the law. The domestic private equity/buyout providers, which have not previously been subject to banking...