Theories in regional science predict that related establishments benefit from their mutual proximity due to forward-backward linkages, labor market pooling and knowledge spillovers (the Marshallian forces). While the existence of these externalities as a whole is well supported by the empirical...

This paper analyzes the evolution of geographical concentration in the West German manufacturing, service, and knowledge-intensive sectors over a time period of 30 years. Drawing on detailed plant data of 187 industries from 1980 to 2010, we observe substantial concentration that is highest in...

In this paper we take a detailed look at the sectoral anatomy of regional growth in German regions over the period 1978-2008. In the aggregate, the German economy is characterized by a secular decline of the manufacturing sector and a rise of the modern service economy. This trend of structural...

Wir untersuchen die Auswirkungen des beispiellosen Anstiegs des internationalen Handels zwischen Deutschland und dem Osten - China und Osteuropa - im Zeitraum 1988-2008 auf lokale Arbeitsmärkte in Deutschland. Anhand von administrativen Daten nutzen wir die regionale Variation der...

This paper analyses the impact of dynamic MAR- and Jacobs-externalities on local employment growth in Germany between 1993 and 2001. In order to facilitate a comparison between the neighbouring countries we firstly replicate the study of Combes (2000) on local employment growth in France and...

The advent of the New Economic Geography has spawned a renewed interest in questions of agglomeration. The present work expands the research on the impact of agglomeration economies on employment growth by connecting two strands of the empirical literature. A localization index and a cluster...

We study the impact of rising robot exposure on the careers of individual manufacturing workers, and the equilibrium impact across industries and local labor markets in Germany. We find no evidence that robots cause total job losses, but they do affect the composition of aggregate employment....

This paper studies the effects of asymmetries in re-election probabilities across parties on public policy and their subsequent propagation to the economy. The struggle between groups that disagree on targeted public spending (e.g., pork) results in governments being endogenously short-sighted:...

This paper analyzes the quantitative role of idiosyncratic uncertainty in an economy in which rational agents vote on hypothetical social security reforms. We find that the role of a pay-as-you-go social security system as a partial insurance and redistribution device significantly reduces...