We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984 to 1995 to analyze longitudinal aspects of marginal employment (geringfügige Beschäftigung) in West Germany. After discussing problems of identifying marginal employment spells, we document that marginal employment spell vary...

According to housing investment models, house prices and replacement costshould have an equilibrating relationship. Previous empirical work|mainlybased on aggregate-level data|has found only little evidence of such a relationship.By using a unique data set, covering transactions 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...

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 ofconvergence. They are continuing to...