The German Federal government has allowed some regions (Approved Local Providers) to be solely responsible for the care of long-term unemployed. The remaining regions had to form Joint Local Agencies, where the local social benefit administrations work together with the local public employment...

This paper investigates how precisely short-term, job-search oriented training programs as opposed to long-term, human capital intensive training programs work. We evaluate and compare their effects on time until job entry, stability of employment, and earnings. Further, we examine the...

I investigate the contribution of pharmaceutical innovation to recent longevity growth in Germany and France. First, I examine the effect of the vintage of prescription drugs (and other variables) on the life expectancy and age-adjusted mortality rates of residents of Germany, using...

The theory of optimal currency areas states that a currency union may succeed if the participating countries have complementary industry structures. If this is not the case a currency union does not, inevitably, have to fail because market forces will induce adjustments of the industry...

The paper analyses the impact of demographic developments on the German pension system until the year 2060. The projections are simulated for a range of assumptions on the latest demographic trends and on the labour market and comprise the latest pension legislation. As a central innovation we...

This paper shows that import exposure affects voting behavior because it affects local labor markets. We develop a new framework for mediation analysis where one instrumental variable is sufficient to identify three causal effects. Using German data from 1987–2009, we find that import exposure...

In this paper, we examine the heterogeneous treatment effects of a universal child care (preschool) program in Germany by exploiting the exogenous variation in attendance caused by a reform that led to a large staggered expansion across municipalities. Drawing on novel administrative data from...

Using data from the 2006 wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), this paper analyzes how a minimum wage affects employment, wage inequality, public expenditures, and aggregate income in the low-wage sector. It is shown that a statutory minimum wage of EUR 7.50 per hour would cost...

This paper examines the causal effects of a major change in the German parental leave benefits on fertility. I use the unanticipated reform of 2007 to assess how a move from a means-tested to an earnings-related benefit affects higher-order births. By using data from the Mikrozensus, I find that...

The German government provides discretionary investment grants to structurally weak regions to reduce regional disparities. We use a regression discontinuity design that exploits an exogenous discrete jump in the probability of receiving investment grants, to identify the causal effects of the...