This paper analyzes the effects on voting behavior of information disseminated over the Internet. We address endogeneity in Internet availability by exploiting regional and technological peculiarities of the preexisting voice telephony network that hindered the roll-out of fixed-line...

We provide empirical evidence that the experience of a socialist regime leads to a lack of self-reliance by comparing East and West Germans conditional on regional differences in current economic development. This meaningful lack of self-reliance persists after the regime's breakdown and hinders...

A<sc>udretsch</sc> D. B., F<sc>alck</sc> O., F<sc>eldman</sc> M. P. and H<sc>eblich</sc> S. Local entrepreneurship in context, <italic>Regional Studies</italic>. This paper posits that regions provide locational factors which determine the industry structure and with it entrepreneurial opportunities whose exploitation influences regional dynamics....

We study the effect of cultural ties on economic exchange using a novel measure for cultural identity: dialects. We evaluate linguistic micro-data from a unique language survey conducted between 1879 and 1888 in about 45,000 German schools. The recorded geography of dialects comprehensively...

Why are better educated and more risk-friendly persons more mobile across regions? To answer this question, we use micro-data on internal migrants from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 2000–2006 and merge this information with a unique proxy for region-pair-specific cultural distances...