Germany has had an extremely low growth performance since 1995. The paper looks at the long-run reasons for this loss of economic dynamics besides German unification: These include leaving labor idle, a declining share of investment in GDP, a weaker innovative activity, an ineffective system for...

Germany remains Europe's largest and most diversified source of new technology, but still lags in the fastest growing areas of today's high technology. After World War II, West-German technology policy sought to rebuild the institutions which had supported Germany's leadership in the high-tech...

This paper studies the evolution of early retirement due to disease and injury in the German labor force between 1988 and 2004. Using data from the German Federation of Public Pension Providers, the IMS Health Drug Launches database and the WHO Mortality Database, we show that new drug launches...

This study investigates the role of stratification of health and income in the social cost of healthrelated early retirement, as evidenced in the German Socio-economic Panel (GSOEP). We interpret early retirement as a mechanism to limit work-related declines in health that allows poorer and less...

The development of production, prices and employment in the EU electrical industry between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s is analysed in order to test the hypothesis that the competitive pressure from low-income countries has led to the observed decline of the employment share of low-skilled...

Based on a standard idea-based model of endogenous growth we test the hypothesis that regional innovative activity is path-dependent, and investigate the geographical scope of knowledge spillovers. Using data for West-German regions, two alternative indicators of the stock of knowledge are...

Das Umlage- und das Kapitaldeckungsverfahren werden verglichen. Das Kapitaldeckungsverfahren hat eine größere Rendite für den einzelnen und bringt gesamtwirtschaftliche Effizienzgewinne mit sich: Es wird mehr Kapital gebildet, und Verzerrungen am Arbeitsmarkt werden beseitigt. Bei einem...

Die Rolle der deutschen Arbeitslosenversicherung wird für vier Perioden seit 1871 daraufhin analysiert, ob man bei der Suche nach einem effizienten System der Arbeitslosenversicherung aus der Geschichte lernen kann. Die vier Perioden (Periode I: 1871/1914; II: 1918/32; III: 1933/39; IV: 1949/2001) sind...

This paper examines the role of the health gradient – the positive correlation between household income and health – in individual retirement behavior, using data from the German Socio-economic Panel (GSOEP). We first estimate agegroup-specific health gradients and find their slope increases...