Locational competition is geographic competition, competition between places, between cities, between regions, and between countries. These spatial units compete with each other for the mobile production factors in factor markets, i.e., for mobile capital, for mobile technical know-how, and for...

An Englishman once watched his first American football game. He looked intently as the team gathered into a huddle after each play. His American host asked him what he thought of the proceedings. “Not a bad sport,” remarked the visitor, “but they do seem to engage in an excessive number of...

The obsolete capital stock in eastern Germany has to be rebuilt. This will increase the capital demand in Germany for the next few years. In addition to the increased demand for capital, government transfers need to be financed. The macroeconomic accounting identity requires that net savings of...

Throughout adulthood and old age, levels of well-being appear to remain relatively stable. However, evidence is emerging that late in life well-being declines considerably. Using long-term longitudinal data of deceased participants in national samples from Germany, the UK, and the US, we examine...

This study examines the phenomenon of nonresponse in the first wave of a refresher sample (subsample H) of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). Our first step is to link additional (commercial) microgeographic data on the immediate neighborhoods of the households visited by...

Social comparisons are an essential source of information about the self. Research in social psychology has shown individual variation in the tendency toward comparison with other people's opinions and abilities, raising the question of whether social comparisons are driven by psychological...

Self-reported measures of health are generally treated as weak measures of respondents' objective health status. On the other hand, most surveys use self-reported health to measure health status and to determine the effects of a range of other socio-economic characteristics of the local...