The focus of this paper is on the choice of the unemployed between becoming an entrepreneur or not. It contributes to the literature by empirically investigating two hitherto neglected issues: What is the impact of risk aversion and personal contact with a role model in shaping the decision to...

The economic forecasts for Germany in the period 2001 to 2003 grossly missed reality. Forecasters estimated an average annual growth rate of 1.6 per cent, but real GDP actually grew by only 0.3 per cent per annum. In 2003 the real GDP in Germany even shrank by 0.1 per cent. Forecasters tend to...

Using a knowledge production framework and a rich set of plant level data this study demonstrates that in Germany firms that are active on international markets as exporters or foreign direct investors do generate more new knowledge than firms which sell on the national market only. These...

In addition to efficiency standards and consumer information, car-related taxes constitute one of three pillars of the European Commission¿s strategy to reduce CO2 emissions from passenger cars. A longstanding question concerns the effectiveness of such taxes in determining the car-purchasing...

Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality longitudinal data at the enterprise level for Germany, this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between exports and profitability. It documents that the positive profitability differential of...

Previous literature largely ignores the heterogeneity of aid channels used by each single donor country. We estimate Tobit models to assess the relative importance of recipient need, recipient merit and self-interest of donors for various channels of official and private German aid across a...

This study uses the hedonic approach to measure the amenity value of climate in Germany. Unlike in earlier research separate hedonic wage and house price regressions are estimated for relatively small geographic areas and formal tests undertaken to determine whether the coefficients describing...

Based on a standard idea-based model of endogenous growth we test the hypothesis that regional innovative activity is path-dependent, and investigate the geographical scope of knowledge spillovers. Using data for West-German regions, two alternative indicators of the stock of knowledge are...

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...

Although economic agents routinely face various types of economic uncertainty, their effects are often unclear and hard to assess, in part due to the absence of suitable measures of uncertainty. Because of the numerous and very substantial institutional changes that people in the transition...