This paper investigates the effects of tuition fees on the university enrollment and location decision of high school graduates in Germany. After a Federal Constitutional Court decision in 2005, 7 out of 16 German federal states introduced tuition fees for higher education. In the empirical...

Das Papier zeigt zunächst mögliche Gründe und Ursachen für die Errichtung und die Bewahrung unabhängiger Institutionen in demokratischen Rechtsstaaten auf. Danach werden formelle und behavioralistische Kriterien benannt, anhand derer der Grad der Unabhängigkeit auf einem Kontinuum zwischen...

Auf der Basis eines mittels einer Onlinebefragung erhobenen Datensatzes wird auf der Basis der haushalts- bzw. konsumgütertheoretischer Überlegungen und verhaltenstheoretischer Konzepte untersucht, wie der Umfang der von ehrenamtlich Engagierten in Fußballvereinen geleisteten Arbeit von der...

Public child care is expected to assist families in reconciling work with family life. Yet, empirical evidence for the relevance of public child care to maternal employment is inconclusive. We exploit the introduction of a legal claim to a place in kindergarten in Germany, which was contingent...

Microfinance in general and microcredit programs in particular have attracted much attention among interest groups concerned with poverty eradication and are seen by many as highly promising means in order to alleviate poverty. More recently, the spotlight has turned increasingly on the...

I study the integration of regions in the form of a merger of populations, which I interpret as a revision of people's social space and their comparison set; I illustrate the way in which a merger can aggravate social distress; and I consider policy responses. Specifically, I view the merger of...

We examine the impact of European car scrappage programs on new vehicle registrations and respective CO2 emissions. To construct proper counterfactuals, we develop MSCM-T, the multivariate synthetic control method using time series of economic predictors. Applying MSCM-T to a rich data set...

In many European countries, labor markets are characterized by high regional disparities in terms of unemployment rates on the one hand and low geographical mobility among the unemployed on the other hand. This is somewhat surprising and raises the question of why only minor shares of unemployed...

We study the effects of a Danish wage subsidy program for highly educated workers on the labor market outcomes of the persons participating in the program and on the performance of the firms that hired these subsidized workers. Using data on the population of program participants, both...

This study looks at the effects of participating in active labour market policy programs for persons with work disabilities. More in detail, it draws attention to the importance of taking into account the timing of when a work disability has been registered for persons attending ALMP programs....