In contrast to West Germany, illicit drugs were virtually absent in East Germany until 1990. However, after the collapse of the former GDR, East Germany was expected to encounter a sharp increase in substance abuse. By analyzing individual data, we find that East Germany largely caught up with...

In the 2000s, a major educational reform in Germany reduced the academic high school duration by one year while keeping constant the total number of instructional hours before graduation. The instructional hours from the eliminated school year shifted to lower grade levels, which increased the...

Objectives: 4220 new cases of tuberculosis (TB) were reported in Germany in 2012; of those, 65 cases were multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) or extensively multidrug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) cases. However, there is only limited information on the economic consequences of drug resistance patterns on the...

The rising trends both in drug addiction and crime rates are of major public concern in Germany. Surprisingly, the economic theory of crime seems to ignore the drugs{crime nexus, whereas the criminological literature considers illicit drug use a main reason of criminal activities. This paper...

The rising trends both in drug addiction and crime rates are of major public concern in Germany. Surprisingly, the economic theory of crime seems to ignore the drugs-crime nexus, whereas the criminological literature considers illicit drug use a main reason of criminal activities. This paper...

This paper tests the hypothesis that unions, through imposing wage floors that lead to wage compression, increase on-the-job training. Our analysis focuses on Germany which provides an interesting context to test this hypothesis, due to its large scale apprenticeship programme and its collective...

The question of whether two drugs - namely alcohol and tobacco - are used as complements or substitutes is of crucial interest if side-effects of anti-smoking policies are considered. Numerous papers have empirically addressed this issue by estimating demand systems for alcohol and tobacco and...

The concept of a Joint Criminal Enterprise (JCE) has become a useful tool in international criminal law. It allows courts to hold individuals criminally liable for group activities to which they have contributed in a criminally relevant way. The concept allows for an attribution of criminal...