In 1997 Chancellor Kohl proposed a major pension reform: he pushed the law through Parliament explaining that the German PAYG system had become unsustainable. One limitation of the new law - one that is crucial for our identification strategy - is that it left the generous pension entitlements...

This paper focuses on the role of home country's birth rates in shaping immigrants' fertility. We use the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to study completed fertility of first generation immigrants who arrived from different countries and at different times. We find that women from countries...

It has long been argued that economic phenomena are affected by culture. However, the causal effect of cultural ties on economic exchange is difficult to identify, chiefly because cultural ties are endogenous to the current level of economic exchange, and because it is hard to separate culture...

We investigate whether time-persistent cultural borders impede economic exchange across regions of the same country. To measure cultural differences we evaluate, for the first time in economics, linguistic micro-data about phonological and grammatical features of German dialects. These data are...

This paper focuses on the role of home country’s fertility culture in shaping immigrants’ fertility. I use the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to study completed fertility of first-generation immigrants who arrived from different countries and in different years. The variation in total...

We study the effect of cultural ties on economic exchange using a novel measure for cultural identity: dialects. We evaluate linguistic micro-data from a unique language survey conducted between 1879 and 1888 in about 45,000 German schools. The recorded geography of dialects comprehensively...

Using empirical evidence from panel analysis of current account dynamics and of bilateral trade balances, the paper argues that the large German current account surplus during the 2000s can be explained by an increasing gap between productivity growth in manufacturing vis-à-vis services. Such a...