The average height of children is an indicator for the quality of nutrition and health care. Heights have never declined over longer time spans in Eastern Germany since 1880 - except for the most recent period 1997-2006. In the Eastern German Land of Brandenburg, a data set of 253,050 pre-school...

We present a dynamic quantitative trade and migration model that incorporates downward nominal wage rigidities and show how this framework can generate changes in unemployment and labor participation that match those uncovered by the empirical literature studying the “China shock.” We find...

The literature on public goods has shown that efficient outcomes are impossible if participation constraints have to be respected. This paper addresses the question whether they should be imposed. It asks under what conditions efficiency considerations justify that individuals are forced to pay...

We consider a sequential game in which one player produces a public good and the other player can influence this decision by making an unconditional transfer. An efficient allocation requires the Lindahl property: the sum of the two (implicit) individual prices has to be equal to the resource...

We estimate Okun's law, the negative relationship between output and the unemployment rate, at the sector level for the US, the UK, Japan, and Switzerland to test several hypotheses that may explain why the aggregate Okun's coeffcients are different across countries. Specifically, we show that...

This paper investigates regional or international transfers as a means to prevent immigration into unemployment. We analyze a two-country model with free migration in which the rich country is characterized by minimum wage unemployment. Matching grants for investment in infrastructure are...

In this paper, we tackle the issue of locating a public facility which provides a public good in a closed and populated territory. This facility generates differentiated benefits to neighborhoods depending on their distance from it. In the case of a Nimby facility, the smaller is the distance,...