With this paper we seek to contribute to the literature on the relation between finance and growth. We argue that most studies in the field fail to measure the quality of financial intermediation but rather resort to using proxies on the size of financial systems. Moreover, cross-country...

In this paper we present a new database that allows deep industry-level growth accounting from 1991-2003. The database allows for the first complete analysis of the German industry performance drivers based on the contributions of 12 asset types in 52 different industries. The industry sources...

Germany remains Europe's largest and most diversified source of new technology, but still lags in the fastest growing areas of today's high technology. After World War II, West-German technology policy sought to rebuild the institutions which had supported Germany's leadership in the high-tech...

It is sometimes argued that more advertising raises consumption which in turn stimulates output and so economic growth. We test this hypothe- sis using annual German data expressed in terms of GDP for the period 1950-2000. We find that advertising does not Granger-cause growth but Granger-causes...

The salient rank-size rule known as Zipf's law is not only satisfied for Germany's national urban hierarchy, but also for the city size distributions in single German regions. To analyze this phenomenon, we build on the insights by Gabaix (1999) that Zipf's law follows from a stochastic growth...

Among all G20 countries, Germany has the lowest level of inequality in terms of disposable income. Germany's tax and transfer system - which has a strong and effective redistributive impact compared with other countries - plays a key role in this connection. Over the past ten years, positive...

2012 hat die Bundesregierung eine Demografiestrategie formuliert und einen entsprechenden Gipfel organisiert. Der Strategie fehlt allerdings eine Leitlinie, die angesichts der nach 2020 zu erwartenden demografischen Probleme sehr dringend benötigt würde. Vor allem müssen institutionelle...

The salient rank-size rule known as Zipf's law is not only satisfied for Germany's national urban hierarchy, but also for the city size distributions in single German regions. To analyze this phenomenon, we build on the insights by Gabaix (1999) that Zipf's law follows from a stochastic growth...