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...

Using a dynamic factor model, we uncover four main empirical regularities on international comovements in a long-run panel of real and nominal variables. First, the contribution of world comovements to domestic output growth has decreased over the post-WWII period. The contribution of regional...

We exploit a unique historical setting to investigate how refugee-specific government aid affects the medium-term outcomes of refugees who migrate as children and young adults. German Democratic Republic (GDR) refugees who escaped to West Germany between 1946 and 1961 who were acknowledged to be...

This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person's actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical...

Unification fundamentally changed the terms of quantitative macroeconomic analysis for Germany. Two main areas concerned are data availability for the eastern part of Germany and structural changes within the behavioural equations after unification. Our paper presents results from the estimation...