Nachdem die chinesische Volkswirtschaft im Verlauf der 1990er Jahre zur Werkbank der Welt” aufgestiegen war, ist angesichts massiv ausgeweiteter F&E Budgets in den letzten Jahren die Frage aufgekommen, inwiefern China in naher Zukunft nicht auch zur Wissensfabrik der Welt aufsteigen könnte....

This paper investigates empirically firm investment behavior in research and development (R&D). Firms make investments in R&D in order to produce innovations. These innovations in turn improve the firm's future productivity level, pro tability and incentives to invest in R&D. Using German...

We specify and estimate a dynamic structural life-cycle model of labor supply, retirement and savings decisions of single-adult and couple households. Drawing on our model, we study the interplay between family labor supply and public insurance mechanisms. By including family labor supply, we...

We apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of preference heterogeneity, derived from structural labour supply models. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of...

In several empirical contributions researchers have found a gender gap in preferences for public spending. This paper analyzes the persistence of these gender gaps when income differences between individuals are taken into consideration. Using survey data from the years 1996 and 2006 of German...

In 2009, Germany invested 15.4 Billion Euro in infrastructure to avert the looming recession. In this study, we evaluate whether the German stimulus program was successful in limiting the impact of the crisis on the job market. We exploit exogenous cross-sectional variation to identify the...