The East-West gap in the German population is believed to originate from migrants escaping the socialist regime in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We use newly collected regional data and the combination of a regression discontinuity design in space with a difference-in-differences...

We examine the relationship between unemployment benefits and unemployment using Swedish regional data. To estimate the effect of an increase in unemployment insurance (UI) on unemployment we exploit the ceiling on UI benefits. The benefit ceiling, coupled with the fact that there are regional...

One of the most notable social phenomena in China is the large urban-rural disparity. There are many studies of it, but most of them focus on income or earnings inequality. In this paper, we investigate the consumption disparity between urban and rural households in China from 1988 to 2002. Our...

European labor markets are characterized by the low geographical mobility of workers. The absence of mobility is a factor behind high unemployment when jobless people prefer to remain in their home region rather than to go prospecting in more dynamic areas. In this paper, we attempt to...

Despite a broad consensus on the need to take into account the value of public services and geographical cost of living differences when measuring poverty, there is little reliable evidence on how these factors actually affect poverty estimates. Unlike the standard approach in studies of the...

Low rates of internal migration in many European countries contribute to the persistence of significant regional labor market differences. To further our understanding of the underlying reasons I study internal migration in Germany, using the Mikrozensus, a very large sample of households living...

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...

We study the extent of overcrowding amongst British urban working families in the early 1900s and find major regional differences. In particular, a much greater proportion of households in urban Scotland were overcrowded than in the rest of Britain and Ireland. We investigate the causes of this...

This paper uses nonparametric techniques to study GDP convergence across German labor market regions and counties during the period 1992-2004. The main result is that regional convergence in unified Germany has been substantial. In the first years after German unification the distribution of GDP...

This paper analyzes the determinants of local institutions and distribution of political power within a constant 'macro-institutional' setting. We show that characteristics of Brazilian municipalities related to institutional quality and distribution of political power are partly inherited from...