Identifying the impact of local firm concentration on individual firm performance is likely to produce a selection bias related to the positive effects of local concentration if agglomeration economies and natural advantages coincide. We overcome this problem by exploiting exogenous variation...

In January 2005, the German Supreme Court permitted the state governments to charge tuition fees. By exploiting the natural experiment, we examine how government ideology influenced tuition fee policy. The results show that right-wing governments were active in introducing tuition fees. By...

Eintrag für die Universitätsbibliographie

We shed new light on the relative importance that schools’ ability to produce high achievers in math has for economic growth. Drawing on data from the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), the world championship in mathematics for high school students, we construct a measure for a...

We experimentally compare standard two-player trust games to three-player trust games, where two trustors compete for one trustee. We argue that a competitive environment could affect how the trustors’ behaviour is perceived by the trustee. If two trustors compete for the favour of a trustee,...

We test whether new firms locate close to incumbent firms of the same industry. Tendencies to coagglomerate may explain the general wisdom that industry location is highly persistent over time. We perform separate analysis for East and West Germany which enables us to study two integrated areas...

Friedrich Froebel, a German pedagogue, established the first kindergarten worldwide in Thuringia in 1839. We study the spatial dissemination of the kindergarten movement in Germany in the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Spatial dissemination can be explained by the cultural proximity,...

School choice research mostly focuses on academic outcomes. Policymakers increasingly view entrepreneurial traits as a non-cognitive outcome important for economic growth. We use international PISA-2006 student-level data to estimate the effect of private-school competition on students’...