We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied zone to prevent expropriation. We show that the regional location decisions...

In this paper we emphasize the contribution of technical change, broadly defined, towards productivity growth in explaining the relative East Germany-West Germany performance during the post-World War II era. We argue that previous work was excessively focused on physical capital investments...

This paper advances the hypothesis that the EUS crisis was caused by German unification. The unification has implied a massive resource demand which parallels the US resource demand following Reagan's tax reforms in the eighties. The resource demand revised the German interest rates relative to...

This paper examines the impact of exposure to foreign media on the economic behavior of agents in a totalitarian regime. We study private consumption choices focusing on former East Germany, where differential access to Western television was determined by geographic features. Using data...

While output declined in virtually all transition economies in the initial years, the speed and extent of the recovery that followed has varied widely across these countries. The contrast between the more and less successful transitions, the latter largely in the former Soviet Union, raises many...

This paper develops a general equilibrium two country, two commodity dynamic simulation model of international trade in commodities and financial claims. The model generalizes the Heckscher-Ohlin static theory of trade by incorporating costs of quickly adjusting levels of capital stocks in...

This paper provides a detailed discussion of the real phenomena that materialized in the stabilization period which followed the German hyper-inflation. Significant real dislocations arose after the monetary reform; and these can be attributed to a government policy which subsidized heavy...