Very little is known about the effectiveness of SME policies, and a careful look at the structure, mechanisms and incentives provided by these policies suggest caution in their implementation and, most importantly, the need to carefully and closely monitor their results. This paper relies on the...

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...

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...

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...

Populous communities often prefer more government involvement than less populous communities, but does community size per se affect citizens' preferences for government? Endogeneity commonly prevents testing for causal effects because (i) people can select into communities while (ii) government...

Much has been written about politicians' preferences for electoral systems, yet little is known about the preferences of voters. In 1993, New Zealand had a binding electoral referendum on the same day as the general election where voters chose between keeping a single plurality system (First...

We study management practices and performance of public sector organizations in Germany. For a representative sample of municipalities, we provide survey evidence for substantial heterogeneity in the use of structured management practices. This heterogeneity is not driven by differences across...

The literature on remittances is large and growing. However, its focus has mainly been on the effects of remittance inflows on the receiving economies. Little has been done on the sending economies. In this paper, we use data from Saudi Arabia, one of the top remitting countries in the world, to...