The 'starving the beast' hypothesis claims that tax cuts lead to lower public spending, rather than higher debt levels and higher taxes in the future. This paper uses the institutional setting of German fiscal federalism to its advantage in order to explore how fiscal policy reacts to exogenous...

This study deals with a specific volunteering aspect revealed in the German refugee crisis 2015/16. German federalism prescribing interjurisdictional assignments of tasks for designing, financing and implementing services for refugees and their geographic distribution have made municipalities...

Cooperative fiscal federalism needs a multi-level consent to decide on the allocation of intergovernmental transfers. We study how parliamentary representation of municipalities on the federal level influences the allocation of federal transfers to municipal governments under this type of...

Using rich linked employer-employee data for (West) Germany between 1996 and 2014, we analyze the most important drivers of the recent rise in German wage dispersion and pin down the relative contribution of plant and worker characteristics. Moreover, we separately investigate the drivers of...

We investigate the unemployment pathway to retirement in Germany and study the causal effects of two early retirement reforms. Reform 1 (NRA) increased normal retirement age stepwise from 60 to 65. Simultaneously, it became possible to use early retirement with benefit discounts. Reform 2 (ERA)...

This paper analyses technical efficiency of European banks over the period 1996-2003 with unbalanced panel data techniques. A latent class frontier model is used which allows the identification of different segments in the production frontier. We find that there are three statistically...

Behavioral economics documents the importance of status and self-image concerns in the workplace, but is largely silent about how to instrumentalize them to induce effort. Awards - widespread in the corporate sector and elsewhere - are motivators that derive their value from such social...

We provide an evaluation of the impact of public subsidy schemes that aimed to support the development of basic broadband infrastructure in rural areas of Germany. Such subsidies are subject to state aid control by the European Commission (EC). While the EC increasingly recognises the role of...

This paper estimates the effect of innovation on employment at the firm level. Our uniquely long innovation panel data set of German manufacturing firms covers more than 20 years and allows us to use various innovation measures. We can distinguish between product and process innovations as well...

To study whether current spending levels and public knowledge of them contribute to transatlantic differences in policy preferences, we implement parallel survey experiments in Germany and the United States. In both countries, support for increased education spending and teacher salaries falls...