The controversy about sovereign debt cuts loomed prominently throughout crisis in the European Union (EU), as the EU legal rules were viewed to impose strict limitations on debt restructuring involving public creditors due to moral hazard concerns enshrined in the legal ban on bailouts. This...

The paper analyses the empirical relationship between immigrants and crime using panel data for 391 German administrative districts between 2003 and 2016. Employing different standard panel estimation methods, we show that there is no positive association between the immigrant rate and the crime...

This paper investigates how the size of co-ethnic networks at the time of arrival affect the economic success of immigrants in Germany. Applying panel analysis with a large set of fixed effects and controls, we isolate the association between initial network size and long-run immigrant outcomes....

The 'starving the beast' hypothesis claims that tax cuts lead to lower public spending, rather than higher debt levels and higher taxes in the future. This paper uses the institutional setting of German fiscal federalism to its advantage in order to explore how fiscal policy reacts to exogenous...

Motivations to participate in the labour market as well as to invest in labour market skills are crucial for the successful integration of refugees. In this paper we use a unique dataset - the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Refugee Survey, which is a representative longitudinal study of all refugees reported on...

In this paper, we extend Henning Bohn's (2008) fiscal sustainability test by allowing for slope heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence (CD). In particular, our econometric approach is the first that allows fiscal reaction functions (FRF) to capture unobserved heterogeneous effects from...

We analyze whether start-up rates in different industries systematically change with business cycle variables. Using a unique data set at the industry level, we mostly find correlations that are consistent with counter-cyclical influences of the business cycle on entries in both innovative and...

Inequality of opportunity, particularly when overlaid with racial, ethnic, or cultural differences, increases the social distance between individuals, which is widely believed to limit the scope of cooperation. A central question, then, is how to bridge such divides. We study the effects of a...

Naturalization may be a relevant policy instrument affecting immigrant integration in host-country labor markets. We study the effect of naturalization on labor market outcomes of immigrants in Germany. We apply recent survey data and exploit a reform of naturalization rules in an instrumental...

We investigate the wage assimilation of East Germans who migrated to West Germany after reunification (1990-1999). We compare their wage assimilation to that of ethnic German immigrants from Eastern Bloc countries and international immigrants to West Germany who arrived at the same time. The...