We analyze the impact of increasing longevity on technological progress within an R&D-based endogenous growth framework and test the modelś implications on OECD data from 1960 to 2011. The central hypothesis derived in the theoretical part is that - by raising the incentives of households to...

This paper studies whether higher level governments treat politically aligned municipalities differently than unaligned ones when they provide special discretionary transfers to resolve acute fiscal problems (special needs transfers). By implementing a regression discontinuity design with a...

This paper studies with disaggregated budget data how expenditures, revenues, and borrowing evolve in municipalities that receive bailouts. It asks whether higher-level governments enforce austerity measures after bailing out indebted municipalities. The sample consists of 421 municipalities in...

We investigate the effects of job-specific knowledge for individual labor earnings of workers in the German economy. The results indicate a positive effect for earnings stemming in particular from high-knowledge in the areas of sales and marketing, computers and electronics, mathematics, biology...

We investigate the formation of market prices in a new experimental setting involving multi-period call-auction asset markets with state-dependent fundamentals. We are particularly interested in two informational aspects: (1) the role of traders who are informed about the true state and/or (2)...

Structural innovations in multivariate dynamic systems are typically hidden and often identified by means of a-priori economic reasoning. Under multivariate Gaussian model innovations there is no loss measure available to distinguish alternative orderings of variables or, put differently,...

This paper applies the indirect evolutionary approach to study the evolution of inequality aversion in a simplified game of life. The game comprises a dilemma, a problem of coordination, and a problem of distribution as a general framework for the evolution of preferences. In singlegame...

Formal remittance flows to Pakistan have shown noticeable growth over the past decade. Using bilateral remittance data for 23 major source countries, this study examines the external and internal factors driving these remittance flows during the period 2001-2011. We estimate a gravity model for...