Knowledge and technological change are often assumed to be the driving forces for long run economic growth. Regions with a higher level of knowledge compared to other regions exhibit a higher per-capita income on average. Agglomeration effects can lead to a steady increase of income and widen...

Current political discussions in Germany and other European countries illustrate the importance accorded to revenue and distribution effects of tax reforms. Whereas widely recognized concepts of effective tax measures can provide important insights into the incentives of taxation they do not...

Setting minimum tax rates is a well discussed way of mitigating pressure from tax competition. This paper investigates which motives shape the support for a minimum corporate tax among politicians. We make use of a unique data base: a survey among members of the European parliament. Our results...

Innovation success depends heavily on firm's ability to set priorities and select the most promising options from its project portfolio before the odds of success or failure become visible and reliable. We ask: What does previous innovation experience tell firms about what not to do in the...

Labour market reforms that are designed to stimulate labour supply at the lower end of the wage distribution can never be precisely restricted to affect only the target group. Spillovers to and feedback from other segments of the labour market are unavoidable and may counteract the direct...

We examine the relation between consumer search and equilibrium prices when collusion is endogenously determined. We develop a theoretical model and show that average price is a U-shaped function of the measure of searchers: prices are highest when there are no searchers (local monopoly power)...

This study investigates the within-country heterogeneity of material footprints implied by households' consumption in Germany. Material footprints are defined as the amount of biomass, minerals, and fossil fuels extracted to produce the goods that households consume. Combining input-output data...

We analyze the potential influence of a number of factors on the distribution of equivalized net incomes in Germany over the period 2005/2006 to 2010/11. While income inequality considerably increased in the years before 2005/2006, this trend was stopped after 2005/2006. Among many other...

The aim of this paper is to introduce a new model selection mechanism for cross sectional spatial models. This method is more fexible than the approach proposed by Florax et al. (2003) since it controls for spatial dependence as well as for spatial heterogeneity. In particular, Bayesian and...

We investigate real investment, financial revenues and profits in formerly domestic firms once they enter a multinational entity (MNE) through an acquisition. We argue that following the acquisition, those targets are tax-optimized in a profit shifting context if they are acquired by MNEs with...