The salient rank-size rule known as Zipf's law is not only satisfied for Germany's national urban hierarchy, but also for the city size distributions in single German regions. To analyze this phenomenon, we build on the insights by Gabaix (1999) that Zipf's law follows from a stochastic growth...

The citation analysis of the research output of the German economic research institutes presented here is based on publications in peer-reviewed journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index for the 2000-2009 period. The novel feature of the paper is that a count data model quantifies the...

We present the first attempt to construct a long-run historical measure of subjective wellbeing using language corpora derived from millions of digitized books. While existing measures of subjective wellbeing go back to at most the 1970s, we can go back at least 200 years further using our...

The request for a strengthening of academic research at the German economic research institutes by the German Science Council more than a decade ago was founded on the crucial insight that sound policy advice the traditional task of the institutes can only be guaranteed in the long term if it is...

We exploit Germany's reunification to identify how school-age education affects entrepreneurial intentions. We look at university students in reunified Germany who were born before the Iron Curtain fell. During school age, all students in the West German control group received formal and...

Germany experienced a unique rise in the level of self-employment in the first two decades following unification. Applying the non-linear Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique, we find that the main factors driving these changes in the overall level of self-employment are demographic...

Although comprehensive data from official statistics on new firm formation and entrepreneurs starting a new business are lacking in Germany, we know from empirical studies that entry rates differ between regions, and that the propensity to become an entrepreneur is influenced by...