We analyze the impact of large firms on business tax rates using data from German mu-nicipalities in Hesse in 1998-2005. Results suggest that business tax rates decrease with tax-payers' concentration, indicating strong local lobbying power of large firms. -- tax competition ; yardstick...

This paper provides background information and basic descriptive statistics for a representative survey of the German population conducted on our behalf by GfK in the first quarter of 2018. The survey covers various topics, including: 1) attitudes towards asylum seekers; 2) migrating workers in...

This paper examines what regional characteristics drove urban economic growth in Europe during the past decade. Possible impacts on the new member states in Central Europe due to expansion of the European Union are accounted for by comparison between two periods, before and after 2004. With a...

For spatial data with a sufficiently long time dimension, the concept of global cointegration has been recently included in the econometrics research agenda. Global cointegration arises when non-stationary time series are cointegrated both within and between spatial units. In this paper, we...

This paper employs quantile panel regression to the study of fuel price elasticities. Contrasting with standard panel approaches, this method reveals the impact of explanatory variables across all points in the conditional distribution of the response variable while controlling for unobserved...

A widespread view in the "political budget cycles" literature is that incumbent politicians seek to influence voters' perceptions of their competence and/or preferences by using the composition of the fiscal budget as a signalling tool. However, little is known about whether voters actually...

This paper investigates whether the socioeconomic status of the head of government helps explain fiscal performance. Applying sociological research that attributes differences in people's ways of thinking and acting to their relative standing within society, we test whether the social status of...

In this article, we investigate the differences in smoking behavior between male Turkish immigrants and male Germans, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). More specifically, we use a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method for count data models, and isolate differences in the...

In this paper, we decompose body mass index (BMI) differences between Turkish immigrants and Germans in West Germany for women and men. We focus on isolating the part of BMI differences that can be explained by differences in observed socioeconomic status from the part attributable to...

Equivalence scales are routinely applied to adjust the income of households of different size and composition. Because of their practical importance for the measurement of inequality and poverty, a large number of methods for the estimation of equivalence scales have been proposed. Until now, no...