The vast majority of regions in West Germany, and the EU, have become more similar in terms of per-capita income and productivity between 1980 and 2000. But a number of rich areas - generally large agglomerations - have succeeded in departing from this trend of convergence. They are continuing...

After 20 years of transition from an economy integrated in an exchange scheme of planned economies towards an open market economy based on the ideas of competition, we ask whether East German firms succeeded in finding their place in the international division of labour. We concentrate on the...

Die Gestaltung der Produktpalette war ein zentrale Herausforderung für ostdeutsche Unternehmen nach der Wende. Spezialisierung oder eine diffuse Generalistenstrategie war die Frage. Welche Strategie sich durchgesetzt hat und ob der Anschluss an den Westen gelang, wird in dieser Arbeit erstmals...

East German wages have been below the West German wage level since unification. Moreover, the East-West wage gap implied by the contractual wages specified in collective wage agreements is drifting ever further apart from the wage gap in terms of effective wages. This paper looks at the role of...

The purpose of this paper is to sort out firm-related differences from effects that result from different economic structures. A non-parametric decomposition is used to analyse firm level difference between the wage spread in the two major regions of unified Germany. If firm-specific effects...

We develop a composite indicator measuring the performance of national innovation systems. The indicator takes into account both “hard” factors that are quantifiable (such as R&D spending, number of patents) and “soft” factors like the assessment of preconditions for innovation by...

Market value predictions for residential properties are important for investment decisions and the risk management of households, banks, and real estate developers. The increased access to market data has spurred the development and application of Automated Valuation Models (AVMs), which can...

We use Adaptive Weights Smoothing (AWS) of Polzehl and Spokoiny (2000, 2003, 2006) to estimate a map of land values for Berlin, Germany. Our data are prices of undeveloped land that was transacted between 1996-2009. Even though the observed land price is an indicator of the respective land...

The price for a single-family house depends both on the characteristics of the building and on its location. We propose a novel semiparametric method to extract location values from house prices. After splitting house prices into building and land components, location values are estimated with...

In a world with complete markets and no transactions cost, the decision whether to rent or buy a home is separate from a household's professional income risk. If markets are incomplete and have frictions, however, profession- specific income risk, regional house price risk, and mobility needs...