The paper addresses the welfare implications of conditional grants if government failure leads to inefficiencies in the production of regional public goods and services. Conditional grants may improve welfare by setting incentives for regions to improve efficiency. At the same time, resources...

Fibre-deployment of next-generation communications networks is currently a major challenge for investing firms as well as for national regulators and is also subject to hot debates at EU level. This work examines the role of regulatory policies and competition controlling for relevant supply and...

This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person?s actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical...

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Entscheidung junger Mütter, die im Jahr vor der Geburt eines Kindes berufstätig waren, in einem Zeitraum von bis zu drei Jahren nach der Geburt auf den Arbeitsmarkt zurückzukehren. Neben dem Einfluss sozioökonomischer Faktoren werden die Auswirkungen...

It is often noted that employment rates of females have been rising during the last decades. However, in contrast to men, women are often part-time employed and the allocation of working time over the life-cycle is linked to family formation. In addition, employment rates may differ across skill...

Labor market participation rates of West German females have risen during the last decades, whereas participation rates of males have declined or remained stable. Nevertheless, differences in aggregate gender specific participation rates remain. The purpose of this paper is to compare life cycle...

This paper exploits the introduction of the right of referenda at the local level in the German state of Bavaria in 1995 to study the fiscal effects of direct democracy. In the first part of the paper, we establish the relationship between referenda activity and fiscal performance by using a new...