We examine how electoral motives influence active labor market policies that promote job-creation. Such policies reduce unemployment statistics. Using German state data for the period 1985 to 2004, we show that election-motivated politicians pushed job-promotion schemes before elections. --...

In 2009, Germany invested 15.4 Billion Euro in infrastructure to avert the looming recession. In this study, we evaluate whether the German stimulus program was successful in limiting the impact of the crisis on the job market. We exploit exogenous cross-sectional variation to identify the...

The paper sets up a two-region endogenous growth model to discuss growth and regional convergence of unified Germany. It emphasises the role of private and public capital accumulati on during the developing process. The theoretical part derives fiscal policy rules which establish convergence of...

Public investment spending declined steadily in advanced economies during the last three decades. Germany is a case in point where the aggregate decline coincided with growing inequality in investments across districts. What explains variation in local investment spending? We assembled a novel...

Aggregate votes for incumbent parties in post-war Germany were determined by the weighted-average growth of real per capita disposable income and the attrition of power, especially when the Federal Chancellor sought re-election more than twice. Similar to earlier results for the US, each...

Some numbers in the political sphere seem to be chosen rather arbitrarily. One example might be the rule set out by the Second Senate of the German Federal Constitutional Court in 1995 that the overall tax load on assets must be limited to 50% of the yield on those assets. This rule was...

Empirical research on the determinants of right and left-wing extremist election successes is still dominated by descriptive statistical methods. The existing literature in political economy and political science mainly relies on interviews and survey results as well as on qualitative analyses...

This study analyzes the importance of parental socialization on the development of children's far right-wing preferences and attitudes towards immigration. Using longitudinal data from Germany, our intergenerational estimates suggest that the strongest and most important predictor for young...

There is a large body of literature analyzing the relationship between objective economic conditions and voting behavior, but there is very little evidence of how perceived economic insecurity impacts on political preferences. Using seventeen years of household panel data from the German...

Dieses Papier untersucht, ob die Festlegung der durchschnittlichen Steuerbelastung deutscher Spitzenverdiener zwischen 1958 und 2011 von der Zusammensetzung der Bundesregierung in Form von Verbindungen zur nationalen (akademischen) Elite und dem Unternehmensnetzwerk beeinflusst wird. Die...