In a recent paper, Bloom et al. (2020) find evidence for a substantial decline in research productivity in the U.S. economy during the last 40 years. In this paper, we replicate their findings for China and Germany, using detailed firm-level data spanning three decades. Our results indicate that...

Using harmonized household survey data, we analyse long run social mobility in the US, the UK, and Germany and test recent theories of multigenerational persistence of socio-economic status. In this country comparison setting we find evidence against Gregory Clark's "universal law of social...

Germany is widely known for its high-quality vocational education and training (VET) system. The two key features of that system are (a) firm-based training programs accompanied by a schoolbased component (of one to two days per week), in which apprentices acquire upper secondary general...

We explore the role of social capital in the spread of the recent Covid-19 pan­demic in independent analyses for Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Swe­den, Switzerland and the UK. We exploit within-country variation in social capital and Covid-19 cases to show that high-social-capital...

This paper re-visits the state of decentralised banking in Germany, Spain and the UK. The cross-country comparison we conducted has identified Germany as having the most decentralised banking system, followed by Spain and the UK, as expected. The development of regional and double-purpose banks,...

In this paper, we explore the long-run effects of cultural and imperial legacies in the Baltic region. Drawing evidence from the 1897 population census in the Russian Empire, we find that localities with a higher share of German historical population are inclined to be more developed in...

Es existieren vielfältige Einflussfaktoren auf die betriebliche und die individuelle Entscheidung, zeitliche und finanzielle Ressourcen in Weiterbildung einzubringen. Beim wichtigsten Motiv – der Erhöhung der Kompetenzen – unterscheiden sich die Unternehmen und die Individuen kaum. Bei den...