Labour market developments have Germany undergone two shocks: German reunification in the early 1990s, and the Hartz reforms in the early 2000s. They separated the German labour market into the traditional rather corporatist labour market segment, characterised by a high degree of coordination,...

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...

This paper investigates to what extent the different subsectors of the knowledge economy are subject to sector-specific spatial patterns of employment dynamics, and whether these patterns are conditional upon the general economic climate in a particular region. To this end, we analyze and...

There is a broad consensus in the literature in that R&D is a precondition for innovation and in turn, for economic growth. On the regional level, this implies that regions with a high stock of R&D should reveal better results when it comes to economic performance. This presumption has lead...

The Euro area is currently going through its worst period of recession and economic stagnation since the Great Depression and World War II. The article tries to give an impression of the extraordinary degree of fiscal austerity and the devastating economic effects it has already had and must be...

Both the German federal as well as the general government recorded a surplus for the fourth time in a row in 2017. The fast consolidation after the Great Recession coincided with the transition period for the full introduction of the federal debt brake, which is sometimes interpreted as...

The German debt brake is often regarded as a great success story, and has therefore served as a role model for the Euro area and its fiscal compact. In this paper we fundamentally criticize the debt brake. We show that (1) it suffers from serious shortcomings, and its success is far from certain...

Currently fiscal policies in Germany seem to be in a very comfortable position and the German Debt Brake is regarded as an institutional precondition for this success and has been exported to the Euro area in the guise of the Fiscal Compact. In this paper we scrutinize German fiscal policies and...