This paper analyses how demographic changes of the labour force affect labour demand. Do firms adjust their hiring behaviour to an ageing society? Combining data at the firm level and the administrative district level, we analyse the hiring behaviour of firms. Our findings suggest that firms...

States have soft budget constraints when they can expect a bailout by the federal government in the event of a financial crisis. This gives rise to incentives for unsound state fiscal policy. We test whether states with softer budget constraints have higher debt and deficits, receive more...

Using a firm-bank panel of more than 1m German firms over 2010-2016, we document that local public bank lending to municipalities crowds out private investment. Our results show how crowding out can happen in a developed economy characterized by low interest rates and fiscal austerity. Our...

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...

This paper provides new evidence on the sustainability of public finances in German states (Laender) by exploiting a newly compiled database covering the years 1950 - 2011. Unlike previous studies on Germany, we analyze fiscal sustainability by applying "gsecond generation" panel cointegration...

The paper aims at assessing discrete complementarities in innovation policies in the context of the Brazilian industry in 2003. The paper considers the approach advanced by Mohnen and and Röller [European Economic Review, 2005] that focuses on supermodularity and submodularity tests for...

Feed-in tariffs under the Renewable Energy Sources Act, the so-called Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz (EEG), have triggered a massive expansion of electricity from renewable energy sources in Germany over the last decade. The increase in non-competitive renewable power generation though went hand in...

This paper questions the widely applied parallelism of demographic and economic development in characterizing urban shrinkage in Germany, and argues that the usage of population change as a single indicator leads to incorrect policy recommendations for combating urban shrinkage. As the cases of...

International comparisons show that the reasons why e-government development in Germany does not occupy the desired "top spot" in rankings lie primarily in the inadequate provision of online services with little corresponding user orientation. In order to provide better and faster public...

This paper applies the Phillips and Sul (2007) method to test for convergence in stock returns to an extensive dataset including monthly stock price indices for five EU countries (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK) as well as the US over the period 1973-2008. We carry out the...