We examine how highway accessibility influences tax policy. We exploit the stagewise expansion of the "Baltic Sea highway" in the East German state Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania as the largest contiguous highway construction project in Germany since 1945. For non-agglomeration municipalities...

Since 2007 the German state governments have been allowed by a constitutional reform to set real estate transfer tax rates. We exploit this reform and investigate whether government ideology predicts the levels and increases in the real estate transfer tax rates. The results show that leftwing...

This paper estimates the incidence of corporate taxes on wages using a 20-year panel of German municipalities exploiting 6,800 tax changes for identication. Using event study designs and differences-in-dierences models, we fins that workers bear about half of the total tax burden. Administrative...

Information about teachers' effectiveness at the hiring stage is particularly scarce despite its importance for personnel decisions. Using the German setting of teacher training, I investigate the relationship of teachers' pre-service cognitive and pedagogical skills as measured by two state...

This study analyzes the efficiency of the road provision of the local governments of eastern German counties using data envelopment analysis. The provision of roads is a costly public service, which makes an efficiency analysis in this field an interesting subject. I enhance the previous...

We analyze the extent to which sales prices for residential housing react to rent-price regulation. To this end, we exploit changes in apartment prices across the regulation treatment threshold. We examine a quasi-natural design in the German federal state of Brandenburg using transaction price...

In research into higher education, the evaluation of completion and dropout rates has generated a steady stream of interest for decades. While most studies only calculate quotes using student and graduate numbers for both phenomena, we propose to also consider the budget available to...

We investigate for Germany the positive correlation between the corporate savings glut in the non-financial corporate sector and the current account surplus from a capital account perspective. By employing sign restrictions our findings suggest that mostly labor market, world demand and...

With the world-wide spread of the internet in the 1990s, the conduction of web or e-mail surveys became popular in research. Although these surveys provide fast data collection and reduced costs, results may suffer from biases due to the survey mode. While a variety of studies concerning mode...