We scrutinize the impact of international productivity gains (spillovers) induced by imports and exports on optimal tariffs. First, we solve a stylized 2x2 trade model of a large open economy and show that (a) productivity gains via exports and imports both reduce the strategically optimal...

This North-South model of Schumpeterian endogenous growth combines a market, productivity and knowledge effect. A set of various convergent and divergent growth paths is derived that is much richer than in the literature so far. South-North convergence based on North-South technology diffusion...

Concerns have been raised that demographic ageing may weaken the competitiveness of knowledge-based economies and increase regional disparities. The age-creativity link is however far from clear at the aggregate level. Contributing to this debate, we estimate the causal effect of the workforce...

Numerous studies have evaluated the effect of nutrition early in life on health much later in life by comparing individuals born during a famine to others. Nutritional intake is typically unobserved and endogenous, whereas famines arguably provide exogenous variation in the provision of...

Demographic change is expected to affect labour markets in very different ways on a regional scale. The objective of this paper is to explore the spatio-temporal patterns of recent distributional changes in the workers age structure, innovation output and skill composition for German regions by...

This paper investigates the long-run relationships between the size and age composition of a city's population and the price of local housing. For estimation purposes, we combine city-level demographic information with housing price data for 87 cities in Germany over the period 1995-2012....

This paper proposes a comprehensive framework for projecting public heath and long-term care expenditures. Notably, it considers the impact of demographic and non-demographic effects for both health and long-term care. Compared with other studies, the paper extends the demographic drivers by...

In Germany, apprenticeship training firms currently face a shrinking number of qualified school-leavers because of smaller birth cohorts and an increasing proportion of school leavers aiming for higher education. This paper investigates whether a programme that supports firms to train...

The paper studies the power of educational investments in relation to transfers for fostering lifetime income and for reducing income inequality in Germany. The welfare analysis is based on a model of age-dependent human capital accumulation, featuring dynamic complementarities in skill...