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...

Identifying the impact of local firm concentration on individual firm performance is likely to produce a selection bias related to the positive effects of local concentration if agglomeration economies and natural advantages coincide. We overcome this problem by exploiting exogenous variation...

The United States have them, European countries long for them, and universities are supposed to provide them"entrepreneurs are ubiquitously wanted because of their supposed impact on innovation and economic growth. The underlying mechanism is developed in Schumpeter's (1912) Theory of Economic...

In this paper, we assess educational factors which might have an impact on entrepreneurship. We analyze influences on the entrepreneurial intentions of German university students and find that pre-university education significantly affects their desire to become an entrepreneur. Using the recent...

We estimate the effect of broadband infrastructure, which enables high-speed internet, on economic growth in the panel of OECD countries in 1996-2007. Our instrumental-variable model derives its non-linear first stage from a logistic diffusion model where pre-existing voice-telephony and...

This paper investigates how group membership and competition among trustors interact with trust and trustworthiness in a laboratory one-shot trust game. To analyze these effects, we apply a 2x2 design. We induce group membership by letting subjects play coordination games with clear focal...

This paper investigates telecommunication operator investment in broadband infrastructure after local deregulation of the wholesale broadband access market. Using a panel dataset covering all 5,598 exchange areas in the United Kingdom, we exploit regional differences in deregulation following a...

Friedrich Froebel, a German pedagogue, established the first kindergarten worldwide in Thuringia in 1839. We study the spatial dissemination of the kindergarten movement in Germany in the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Spatial dissemination can be explained by the cultural proximity,...

Ever since Sjaastad (1962), researchers have struggled to quantify the psychic cost of migration. We monetize psychic cost as the wage premium for moving to a culturally different location. We combine administrative social security panel data with a proxy for cultural difference based on unique...

How important is mastering information and communications technology (ICT) in modern labor markets? Previous research offers no guidance in assessing the labor-market returns to ICT skills, primarily because skill data have been unavailable. We draw on unique data that provide internationally...