Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from...

Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls' school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, evoking a surge of building girls' schools in protestant areas. Using county- and town-level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants decreased the...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the effects of new product versus process innovations on export propensity at the firm level. Product innovation is a key factor for successful market entry in models of creative destruction and Schumpeterian growth. Process innovation helps securing...

Most existing empirical evidence on the impact of profit taxation on multinational firm activity is based on cross-country data. One major drawback of such data is that countries differ not only with regard to taxes but along other dimensions which might be hard to capture by means of observable...

The German Income Tax Reform 2000, which announced a reduction in income tax rates to be implemented in a series of three stages, was welcomed by the public as a step towards unleashing lurking growth potentials. Nonetheless, in the course of the year 2001 a dispute arose, centering around the...

In dieser 14. Aktualisierung der "Bilanz des ehrbaren Staates" werfen die Stiftung Marktwirtschaft und das Forschungszentrum Generationenverträge der Universität Freiburg einen ungeschminkten Blick auf die langfristige Nachhaltigkeit der öffentlichen Finanzen. Für das Update 2020 beläuft...

Nach einem Drittel der Legislaturperiode hat die im Herbst 2009 angetretene schwarz-gelbe Koalition aus CDU, CSU und FDP mit dem Wachstumsbeschleunigungsgesetz, dem Zukunftspaket und der Gesundheitsreform bis Ende 2010 wesentliche Ziele des Koalitionsvertrages angepackt. Dennoch hat die...