This article reconsiders the empirical evidence on regional human capital externalities using longitudal survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). It complements the empirical literature on the role of human capital for explaining regional wage differences. Based on the framework...

There has been vast interest in the distribution of city sizes in an economy, but this research has largely neglected that cities also diff er along another fundamental dimension: age. Using novel data on the foundation dates of almost 8,000 American cities, we fi nd that older cities in the US...

We develop a heterogeneous-fi rms model with trade in goods, labor mobility and credit constraints due to moral hazard. Mitigating fi nancial frictions reduces the incentive of high-skilled workers to migrate to one region such that an unequal distribution of industrial activity becomes less...

The theoretical and empirical innovation literature stresses the importance of regional fac-tors and locational conditions for location choice of firms and their innovation success. Innovation activities are not equally distributed in space because agglomeration effects and specific regional...

In this paper we take a detailed look at the sectoral anatomy of regional growth in German regions over the period 1978-2008. In the aggregate, the German economy is characterized by a secular decline of the manufacturing sector and a rise of the modern service economy. This trend of structural...

Previous research does not teach us much about the role of music for skill development. Learning a musical instrument during childhood may affect educational opportunities by improving cognitive skills, teaching non-cognitive skills or sending positive signals to school teachers. Our study is...

We estimate the effect of changes in the body mass index on wages and satisfaction in a panel of German employees. Dynamic models indicate that satisfaction with life in general and with health are responsive to weight changes, but wages and satisfaction with work are not. These results mainly...

Political regimes influence the contents of education and the criteria used to select and evaluate students. We study the impact of a socialist education on the likelihood of obtaining a college degree, as well as on several labor market outcomes, by exploiting the reorganization of the school...

We assess the relevance of formal education on the productivity of the self-employed and distinguish between opportunity entrepreneurs, who voluntarily pursue a business opportunity, and necessity entrepreneurs, who lack alternative employment options. We expect differences in the returns to...

We analyze the offshorability of jobs using the German Qualifications and Career Survey. The paper differentiates between outsourcing potential and international tradability and systematically uses a large set of potential determinants of organizational and spatial relocation derived from the...