Italy and Germany have similar geographical differences in productivity - North more productive than South in Italy …; West more productive than East in Germany - but have adopted different models of wage bargaining. Italy sets wages based on … nationwide contracts that allow for limited local wage adjustments, while Germany has moved toward a more flexible system that …

A political miracle occurred when Germany was reunited, and at first glance an economic miracle has followed. Real … west Germany. Excessively high wages coupled with investment incentives that made the cost of capital negative rank high …

quantify the aggregate and distributional effects of spatial frictions that hinder worker mobility across regions in Germany … East and West Germany, especially due to the limited ability of workers to obtain job offers from more distant regions …. Despite the large real wage gap between East and West of Germany, removing the spatial frictions leads, in equilibrium, to …

to East Germany in 1989 experience a persistent rise in their personal incomes after the fall of the Berlin Wall … returns to entrepreneurial activity, the share of households who become entrepreneurs, and the likelihood that firms based … within a given West German region invest in East Germany. As a result, West German regions which (for idiosyncratic reasons …

We examine financial literacy in Germany using data from the SAVE survey. We find that knowledge of basic financial … concepts is lacking among women, the less educated, and those living in East Germany. In particular, those with low education … and low income in East Germany have little financial literacy compared to their West German counterparts. Interestingly …

Barro (1991), except that migration out of East Germany has not slowed down. I document that in particular the 18-29 year … old are leaving East Germany, and that the emigration has accelerated in recent years. I document that low wages, high … unemployment and increasing reliance on social security persist across wide regions of East Germany together with these migration …

using administrative data from Germany and find that highly productive firms indeed sort into the most productive locations …. In our main application, we quantify the role of firm sorting for wage differences between East and West Germany, which …