Start-up subsidies for the unemployed have long been an important active labor market policy strategy in Germany. The current subsidy program underwent a major reform in 2011 that changed its key parameters: support was lowered, eligibility criteria were tightened and entitlement was abandoned...

Zur Nachfragebelebung könnten die Regierungen des Bundes und der Länder von der Gewährung einer Investitionsprämie in Höhe von 7,5% für private Investoren Gebrauch machen. Nimmt man als Bemessungsgrundlage nur die Nettoinvestitionen eines Unternehmens, käme für die Investitionsprämie in...

Eine neue Studie von Björn Kauder und Niklas Potrafke untersucht, ob die Ideologie von Regierungen mit dem Wachstum der deutschen Verteidigungsausgaben korreliert. Unter Verwendung verschiedener Maße für die Regierungsideologie wurde kein Effekt festgestellt. Die großen politischen Parteien...

Based on official records from the former East German Ministry for State Security, we quantify the long-term costs of state surveillance on social capital and economic performance. Using county-level variation in the spy density in the 1980s, we exploit discontinuities at state borders to show...

Using a unique dataset of German members of parliament with information on total earnings including outside income, this paper analyzes the politicians' wage gap (PWG). After controlling for observable characteristics as well as accounting for selection into politics, we find a positive PWG...

If people come to live in a country different from their nation state, due to border shifts, expulsion, or migration, they adopt some of the new country's habits after some time. This paper investigates their (return) migration decision when they have been restricted to live in the foreign...

Based on the ideas developed in the literature on the evaluation of active labor market policy, this paper provides a framework for the evaluation of key elements of immigration policy. To this end, the fundamental ingredients of evaluating policy interventions are explained and the specific...

This paper contributes to the literature on specific deterrence by addressing the issue of selecting adolescents into adult and juvenile law systems. In Germany, different from the U.S. and most other countries, turning a critical cutoff age does not cause a sharp discontinuity from juvenile to...