We study the local favoritism of appointed German state ministers. Matching hand-collected data on ministers' place of residence to a sample of more than 8,000 west German municipalities during the period 1994-2013, we find that the home municipality of a state minister experiences higher...

This paper evaluates the impact of public employment on private sector activity using the relocation of the German federal government from Berlin to Bonn in the wake of the Second World War as a source of exogenous variation. To guide our empirical analysis, we develop a simple economic...