The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficiency of the East German economy at the firm level using an unbalanced panel over the transition period 1994 to 1998. We adopt a translog stochastic frontier model to estimate technical efficiency in eastern and western Germany. The results...

Abstract: The first challenge for economic growth theory is to understand the transition from stagnation to growth at the time of the Industrial Revolution and in particular to identify the main factor(s) that triggered the take-off. Doing so also helps to understand why there are poor and rich...

Beyond natural sterility, there are two main types of childlessness: one driven by poverty and another by the high opportunity cost to child-rearing. We argue that taking childlessness and its causes into account matters for assessing the impact of development policies on fertility. We measure...

Among possible lifestyles, the DINKs (“double income no kids”) are couples choosing to be childless, while the DEWKs (“dually employed with kids”) are couples with children. We develop a theory of marriage and parenthood decisions, where we distinguish the choice to have children from...

This paper questions the widely applied parallelism of demographic and economic development in characterizing urban shrinkage in Germany, and argues that the usage of population change as a single indicator leads to incorrect policy recommendations for combating urban shrinkage. As the cases of...