We use German administrative and survey data to investigate the heterogeneity of parttime penalties in hourly wages and growth rates. Exploiting tax reforms for identification, we find substantial heterogeneity in part-time wage penalties from −28.3% to −7.2% compared to full-time. The...

This paper studies a recent legal reform in Germany, which aims to lower commission rates of real estate agents by raising the cost salience of sellers. I find that the reform has backfired and real estate agents have exploited the transition to increase their commission rates. The findings...

We investigate the causal relationship between inventor migration and regional innovation in the context of the large-scale migration shock from East to West Germany between World War II and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Leveraging a newly constructed, century-spanning dataset on...

After the beginning of the war in Ukraine, energy prices in Germany increased drastically. The paper analyses responses of German firms to this energy price shock. A variety of measures and reactions at the firm-level are explored, such as substituting machinery and equipment by less energy...

We explore which start-ups win in public procurement. Most notably, our analysis presents significant differences between firms applying for tenders with and without functional criteria. First, we use representative telephone survey data to estimate public procurement applicant and winner shares...

In West Germany, the average size of establishments declined during the 1990s and started to increase again in the late 2000s, while the employer size wage premium followed the opposite trajectory. In this paper, we show that these two developments are interrelated. More precisely, our results...

This article describes ZEW-EviSTA®, the microsimulation model developed and used at ZEW - Centre for European Economic Research in Mannheim. The model simulates the German tax and transfer system using household micro level data. By estimating fiscal effects, labor market outcomes as well as...

We study how the presence of a college affects the local economy using administrative data. Our analysis exploits the opening of new institutions of tertiary education across Germany in the 1980s and 1990s. The new college substantially increased the student population and share of high-skilled...