This paper investigates the effects of tuition fees on the university enrollment and location decision of high school graduates in Germany. After a Federal Constitutional Court decision in 2005, 7 out of 16 German federal states introduced tuition fees for higher education. In the empirical...

The paper analyses how context and time dependent factors determine the impulse of R&D subsidies on firm behavior with respect to private R&D expenditures. Based on data from the German R&D survey, we combine propensity-score matching with a difference-in-difference-estimator in order to measure...

This paper analyzes the effect of the introduction of performance-related funding in the German university sector. Starting in the 1990‘s, the federal states of Germany introduced incentive-based funding systems in order to increase universities‘ performance and efficiency. We estimate the...

This study analyzes the effect of fathers' parental leave-taking on the time fathers spend with their children and on mothers' and fathers' labor supply. Fathers' leave-taking is highly selective and the identification of causal effects relies on within-father differences in leave-taking for...

Arguably, one of the most important developments in the field of applied economics during the last decades has been the emergence of systematic policy evaluation, with its distinct focus on the establishment of causality.By contrast to the natural sciences, the objects of our scientific interest...

The introduction of the German parental leave benefit (Elterngeld) applied to all children born on January 1st, 2007 or later. The new Elterngeld considerably changed the amount of transfers to families during the first two years postpartum. We show that the incentives created by using a cut-off...

With its commitment to double the share of renewable fuels in electricity generation to at least 30% by 2020, the German government has embarked on a potentially costly policy course whose public support remains an open empirical question. Building on household survey data, in this paper we...

In February 2017, Portugal implemented a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), under which producers were to be taxed according to the amount of sugar contained in the drinks they manufactured. We exploit administrative accounting data covering the universe of Portuguese firms between 2012...

Citizenship is the most important right a host country can bestow on its immigrant population. Yet, little is known which citizenship policies work and who actually benefits from them. To answer these questions, we estimate the marginal returns to citizenship on children's school performance and...

This paper studies whether people's perception of improvements in local air quality are reflected in the housing market based on comprehensive data on real estate prices from Germany. Using a quasi-experimental research design, we exploit the staggered introduction of Low Emission Zones (LEZs)...