This research provides a comprehensive study of the linkages between unification and related policy choices on income inequality by examining the cases of Italy and Germany in the context of 19th century unification. To conduct this analysis, the study puts forward estimates of income inequality...

This paper discusses the timing of monetary integration and supporting economic policies during a rapid and largely uncontrolled process of Korean unification. The paper concludes that the transitory use of a separate currency in each region and supporting economic policies would help limit the...

China’s high income and wealth inequality has long attracted the interest of policymakers and re-searchers, yet surprisingly little has been done since 2010 on inequality trends. Given China’s evolving economic structure and the government’s adoption of new policy tools in recent years, we...

We quantify the value of changes in life circumstances in Germany following reunification. To this end, we develop and implement a fixed-effect estimator for ordinal life satisfaction in the German Socio-Economic Panel. We find strong negative effects on life satisfaction from being recently...

The paper studies the determinants of labor force participation by East German women after unification. To isolate the role of preferences on labor force participation from individual characteristics, we develop a panel data model that simultaneously explains participation, employment, and...

The paper studies the role of international implications after EU enlargement. Based on a formal model with migration costs for both capital and labor, it predicts a two-sided migration from the new to the old EU countries which is later reversed. As the migration pattern chosen by market forces...

This paper investigates the causal effect of geographic labour mobility on income. The returns to German East-West migration and commuting are estimated exploiting the structure of centrally planned economies and a natural experiment of German reunification for identification. I find that...

A number of studies suggest that mortality rates among East German men increased in the wake of reunification, in particular between 1989 and 1991, in some age groups by up to thirty percent. This study first examines the developments of mortality and cause of death statistics based on detailed...

This paper provides a comparison of tax morale between inhabitants of East and West Germany in its post-reunification period, using three World Values Survey/European Values Survey waves between 1990 and 1999. German reunification is particularly interesting for the analysis of tax morale as it...