Although many political authorities endorse the basic goal of parity between men and women across the board, reality does not yet reflect this in Germany. In the German Bundestag, for example, at present 37.1 percent of representatives are women. Divided among the six parties with the greatest...

Obwohl viele Verantwortliche in der Politik das grundsätzliche Ziel einer Parität zwischen Männern und Frauen auf allen Ebenen unterstützen, sieht die Realität in Deutschland anders aus. Im Bundestag sind aktuell 37,1 Prozent der Abgeordneten Frauen. Für die anstehende Bundestagswahl...

In many countries, important features of municipal government (such as the electoral system, mayors' salaries, and the number of councillors) depend on whether the municipality is above or below arbitrary population thresholds. Several papers have used a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to...

We study political determinants of municipality amalgamations during a boundary reform in the German state of Brandenburg, which reduced the number of municipalities from 1,489 to 421. The analysis is conducted using data on the political decision makers as well as fiscal and socio-economic...

In this short note, we use data from different elections in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia between 1975 and 2010 to show that the social democrats generally profit from higher voter turnout at the expense of the conservatives. We deal with the endogeneity of voter turnout by using...

This paper studies the causal effects of graduating from university with an honors degree on subsequent earnings. While a rich body of literature has focused on estimating returns to human capital, few studies have analyzed returns at the very top of the education distribution. We highlight the...

Signature requirements are often used as hurdles to prevent overuse of public referenda. We evaluate the causal effect of lowering signature requirements on the number of observed citizen initiatives. Based on municipality-level data for Germany, we make use of legislative changes at specific...

Die lang anhaltende positive konjunkturelle Lage hat auch zu einer Erholung der kommunalen Finanzen geführt. Diese Entwicklung verdeckt aber strukturelle Probleme. Die regionalen Relationen in der deutschen Wirtschaftsstruktur lassen sich nur schwer verändern, sodass die Steueraufteilung...