The authors' main objective in this project was to study the options available to East Germany as it faces into the need to design policies that will take it from the immediate post-transition situation towards the EU average standard of living. After the initial transition, East Germany had a...

We estimate the effect of age at preschool entrance on crucial noncognitive skills in theyear before school starts. Using an instrumental variable approach and exploiting cut-offdates for the time at preschool entrance we find that children entering preschool earlierin life have better...

A source of anxiety of policy makers and the public in general is the detrimental impactof globalization and immigration on unemployment. The transitory restrictions forworker migration after the EU enlargements of 2004 and 2007 exemplify the supposednegative effect of immigration on labor...

This paper explores the role of social groups in explaining the reaction to control.We propose a simple model with a principal using control devices and a controlledagent, which incorporates the existence of social groups. Testing experimentally theconjectures derived from the model and related...

This paper analyzes long-term effects of skilled-worker immigration on productivityfor the Huguenots migration to Prussia. We combine Huguenot immigration lists from1700 with Prussian firm-level data on the value of inputs and outputs in 1802 in aunique data base. In 1685, religious persecution...

Recent literature finds that exporters are particularly vulnerable to financial market frictions.As a consequence, exports may be lower than their efficient levels. For this reason,many countries support exporters by underwriting export credit guarantees. The empiricalevidence on the effects of...

Using data from the US commodity flow surveys, we show that the historical Union-Confederacy border lowers contemporaneous trade between US states by about 16 percentrelative to trade flows within the former alliances. Amongst one million placebos, thereis no other constellation of state...

This paper addresses possible consequences of a minimum wage in a spatial context. An empirical analysis utilizing German data shows that a signifcant spatial wage structure exists and that, as a consequence, the share of workers earning wages below a minimum wage will be particularly high in...

Sick-leave days differ widely among industrialised countries. For the US it is 5, for Sweden 20 and for Poland 26 days per year and per employee. The possible causes for these differences have apparently not been systematically analysed. Two groups of contributing factors are considered: (1)...

In order to assess differences in living conditions across German regions we apply the hedonic approach of Rosen (1979) and Roback (1982) to land-price and wage differences across Germany’s counties. Employing a recent survey of more than half a million Germans on a wide range of social and...