I examine the extent to which the returns to college majors are influenced by selective migration and occupational choice across locations in the US. To quantify the role of selection, I develop and estimate an extended Roy model of migration, occupational choice, and earnings where, upon...

We document large and persistent differences in the acquisitiveness of firms in the U.S. based on the location of their headquarters. We hypothesize and find evidence that local peer effects in M&A activity contribute to such persistence. Specifically, the acquisitiveness of non-dominant...

The objective of this study is to quantify the impact of public investment in space programs on the regional economic activity in the areas host to the program launch operations. I implement an econometric strategy that takes the timing of the Shuttle program retirement as a natural experiment...

This study was prepared by Nadine Fabritz while she was working at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in the Department for Human Capital and Innovation. It was completed in June 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich in October...

We analyze the spatial interaction among regions in North America and in Western Europe. We use a gravity model extended by a spatial correlation structures where data allows to evaluate the level of impact and the length of the spatial tail. This allows us to address to effects external to the...

Public sector activities are often neglected in economic approaches to analyze the driving forces of urban growth and changes in urban hierarchies. One crucial aspect of public sector activities is the institutional status of cities as regional capital. The paper is reporting on a quasi natural...

In this article we estimate the long-run aggregate elasticity of substitution between skilled and unskilled workers. This is an important parameter as it allows us to compute the skill biased technological progress (SBTP) from the evolution of relative wages. However, it is hard to estimate...

The paper aims at testing Florida's concept of the Creative Class using panel data for 323 West German regions for the time period 1975-2004. We apply two different es-timation methods, a panel VAR for the complete data set and a dynamic system ap-proach based on GMM for a modified data set...