We analyse the adjustment of public education spending in response to rapidly decreasing student cohorts in East Germany where birth rates collapsed after German reunification. Previous results from the literature based on data from more stable demographic periods suggest that public resources...

We develop a formula for user costs of housing on the basis of a neoclassical approach to housing investment which does not impose a perfect capital market assumption. We suggest that the definition for the user costs of housing should be extended by an additional term which mirrors the credit...

Real residential investment in Germany is found to be cointegrated with population, real national income per capita and real house prices. This evidence is consistent with a model where the trend in housing demand is determined by demographic factors and economic well-being to which supply...

Distinguishing pure supply effects from other determinants of price and quantity in the market for loans is a notoriously difficult problem. Using German data, we employ Bayesian vector autoregressive models with sign restrictions on the impulse response functions in order to enquire the role of...

Germans are still very fond of using cash. Of all direct payment transactions, cash accounts for an astounding 82% in terms of number, and for 58% in terms of value. With a new and unique dataset that combines transaction information with survey data on payment behaviour of German consumers, we...

Recent literature on multinational firms has stressed the importance of low productivity as a barrier to the cross-border expansion of firms. But firms may also need external finance to shoulder the costs of entering foreign markets. We develop a model of multinational firms facing real and...

This paper investigates the role of corporate taxation with respect to a multinational's investment decision, in which the multinational can pursue either a direct or an indirect investment strategy. The latter involves at least three corporate entities and opens up enhanced opportunities for...

The paper provides evidence concerning incidence and sources of nominal wage rigidity in services and manufacturing, using a new and large employer survey on wage and price setting behaviour for Germany. We observe that wage freezes are more frequent in services than in manufacturing, whereas...

Many European countries restrict immigration from new EU member countries. The rationale is to avoid adverse wage and employment effects. We quantify these effects for Germany. Following Borjas (2003), we estimate a structural model of labor demand, based on elasticities of substitution between...

Aggregated output in industrialized countries has become less volatile over the past decades. Whether this ?Great Moderation? can be found in firm level data as well remains disputed. We study the evolution of firm level output volatility using a balanced panel dataset on German firms that...