We study the short- to medium-run effects of starting a career on a fixed-term contracton subsequent fertility outcomes. We focus on the career start since we expect thattemporary contracts and their inherent economic uncertainty implies a path dependencywhich might have spill-over effects on...

Die Öffentlichkeit hat ein Interesse zu wissen, ob politische Maßnahmen die mit ihnen verfolgten Ziele wirksam und wirtschaftlich erreichen. In empirischen Studien, die als Grundlage für evidenzbasierte Wirtschaftspolitik dienen können, werden häufig komplexe Methoden verwendet, um...

We investigate a case of political favoritism. Some members of the Bavarian parliamenthired relatives as office employees who were paid using taxpayers’ money. The familyscandal was a hot issue in the German media because of the upcoming state and federalelections. We examine whether being...

In this study, we evaluate whether survey-based indicators produce lower forecast errorsfor export growth than indicators obtained from hard data such as price and costcompetitiveness measures. Our pseudo out-of-sample analyses and forecastencompassingtests reveal that survey-based indicators...

Exploiting the information contained in an economy’s input-output matrix and using the novel approach developed by Fisher and Marshall (2011), we calculate Rybczynski effects and Stolper-Samuelson effects for Germany in 2007. We show how sectoral outputand factor remuneration react to...

This paper explores the implications of gender-based income taxation in a noncooperative model of household behavior. In a first step, we show how gender-based taxes can act as Pigou taxes and correct the externality induced by a non-cooperative household equilibrium. We find that the first-best...

We study the effect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques,we match triennial population data for roughly 1000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussiato georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We find positive short- andlong-term effects of having a station...

In January 2005 the German Supreme Court permitted the state governments to chargetuition fees. By exploiting the natural experiment, we examine how government ideologyinfluenced the introduction of tuition fees. The results show that rightwing governmentswere active in introducing tuition fees....

Principal-agent problems can arise when preferences of voters are not aligned with preferences of political representatives. Often the consequence of the political principalagentproblem is political catering to special interests. In this paper I provide examples of principal-agent problems...

We investigate empirically how party ideology influences size and scope of government as measured by the size of government, tax structure and labor market regulation. Our dataset comprises 49 US states over the 1993–2009 period. We employ the new data onthe ideological mapping of US...