Regional fiscal equalization in Germany aims to reduce fiscal disparities by allocating financial resources to less promising regions in order to support the supply of public goods. This paper aims to analyse secondary economic effects of regional fiscal equalization on several economic in- and...

We analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on U.S. county population, employment, and real income growth. Our findings suggest that government organization matters for local economic growth, but that the impacts vary by government unit and by economic indicator. We find that single-purpose...

This paper analyzes whether the expansion of regional airports in Germany caused positive spillover effects on the surrounding economies, exploiting the deregulation of the European aviation market as a quasi-experiment. Such potential spillovers are often used as an argument for the substantial...

Knowledge drives the growth of nations and regions in a competitive space-economy. Hence, we would expect a strong correlation between investments in R&D, knowledge and learning processes, on the one hand, and productivity increases, on the other. However, the empirical evidence shows consistent...

This paper analyses the case of a local secession, i.e. the birth of a new local jurisdiction by separation from an existing one. We present a stylized model in which society is composed of heterogeneous groups and individuals have an homophily bias. The model predicts that: i) separations, such...

This paper investigates the effect of related and unrelated variety on regional growth in West Germany. In particular, we analyze the role of regional absorptive capacity and new business formation for these effects. We find that West German regions benefit from both types of varieties. The...

This paper analyses the causal relationships in regional technological systems within a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework. Applying a data-driven identification strategy based on Independent Component Analysis, it shows how the regional growth dynamics of economic, research,...