We analyze the evolution of the wage structure in East Germany over the past two decades and compare it to West Germany. Both regions experienced a rise in wage inequality between 1995 and 2009 with wage dispersion in East Germany exceeding West Germany, esp. at the top. We also show that wage...

The end of communism in the 1990s probably is the most fundamental restructuring of institutions witnessed in recent history. At its core was the large-scale redistribution of previously state-owned companies. We construct a unique firm-level dataset to study this redistribution in East Germany...

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...

How does a negative labor demand shock impact fertility? I analyze this question in the context of the East German fertility decline after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I exploit differential pressure for restructuring across East German industries which led to unexpected, exogenous, and...

Data from German social security notifications and internal procedures of the Federal Employment Agency are an important source for analyzing labor market trajectories. However, for East Germans these data are only fully available from 1992 onwards. As a consequence of German reunification, by...

We investigate the long-run effects of government surveillance on civic capital and economic performance, studying the case of the Stasi in East Germany. Exploiting regional variation in the number of spies and administrative features of the system, we combine a border discontinuity design with...

This paper explores inequalities in IQ and economic preferences between children from high and low socio-economic status (SES) families. We document that children from high SES families are more intelligent, patient and altruistic, as well as less risk-seeking. To understand the underlying...

We exploit a novel survey of recently arrived asylum seekers in Germany in order to estimate the degree of intergenerational mobility in education among refugees and compare it to the educational mobility of similar-aged individuals in their region of origin. The findings show that the refugees...

More than 25 years after German reunification, key economic indicators for households living in eastern German regions are still below the western German levels. This particularly holds for private net wealth, which reaches only about 40% of the western German level. However, a more granular...