Previous studies found the introduction of the today well established media radio and television to affect political participation. This paper evaluates the effect of the relatively recent introduction of a new medium, broadband internet. OLS resultssuggest a positive association between DSL...

Principal-agent problems can arise when preferences of voters are not aligned with preferences of political representatives. Often the consequence of the political principalagentproblem is political catering to special interests. In this paper I provide examples of principal-agent problems...

Using data from the US commodity flow surveys, we show that the historical Union-Confederacy border lowers contemporaneous trade between US states by about 16 percentrelative to trade flows within the former alliances. Amongst one million placebos, thereis no other constellation of state...

It is a well-established fact that mothers' labour force participation reacts differently todifferent types of family benefits. It is also already well-known that cultural and religiousfactors have an impact on their labour force participation. But does the labour forcereaction to family...

This paper investigates the impact of broadband availability on economic activity as measured by local employment rates. Using panel data on broadband coverage in 8,460 West German municipalities for the period from 2005 to 2009, we find, in fixed effectsregressions, an overall positive, but...

This paper addresses the question of how the competitive situation in the downstream market, the services, and the innovative activity in the upstream market, the network infrastructure, interact. The focus is on the vertical structure of the telecommunication market, which is analysed in the...

We study the effect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques,we match triennial population data for roughly 1000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussiato georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We find positive short- andlong-term effects of having a station...

International specialization is a strong driver of sectoral productivity. This specialization is not only characterized by the diversity of final goods, but also by the variety of intermediate inputs. Thereby the importance of inputs is not only demonstrated by its large shares in gross output,...

We propose a model of production where technical change is both time and management induced. We define a general management index in addition to the general time index of Baltagi and Griffin (1988) and use them as arguments in the translog productionfunction. Time and management induced...

Recent pre-crisis growth accounting exercises attribute strong productivity growth toincreased investments in information and communication technologies (ICT), especiallyduring the mid-1990s. EU-wide stylized facts about a growing US–EU productivity gapare confirmed for Germany, particularly...