The degree of comovement of economic activity across states or regions is an issue of utmost importance to policymakers. Asymmetric business cycles are often seen as an impediment to the formation of a common currency area. However, it has been argued that a common monetary policy in itself...

Welfare is traditionally understood through social security decommodifying labor markets or social investment policies. In the domain of housing, however, welfare for homeowners is largely hidden in the tax codes’ fiscal exemptions. Based on a content analysis of legislation, this paper...

Deutschlands Wohneigentumsquote ist im internationalen Vergleich niedrig - nicht einmal die Hälfte aller Haushalte lebt in den eigenen vier Wänden. Gerade Haushalte mit geringeren Einkommen bilden selten Immobilienvermögen, obwohl es seit rund 60 Jahren Sparprämien gibt, die an diese Gruppen...

As the institutional literature convincingly shows, socioeconomic phenomena are to a large extent shaped by the formal institutions, that is, legal acts (laws and ordinances). However, the latter are formulated in a specific language that is difficult to understand, let alone to measure....

This paper analyzes two dimensions of factors of political trust in Russia. The first is the target dimension (sociotropic vs. egocentric) and the second is the time dimension (retrospective vs. perspective). The study uses microdata from the 2016 Life in Transition Survey (LiTS) of the European...

By lifting lockdown measures as coronavirus case numbers are rising and the vaccine rollout is proceeding slowly, the German economy is being sent on a stop-go course. Re-opening measures will probably be followed by renewed closures, at least regionally, in order to keep the spread of COVID-19...