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...

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...

In an influential paper Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) argue that the evidence on the international disparity in per-capita income levels and growth rates is consistent with a standard Solow model, once it has been augmented to include human capital as an accumulable factor. In a study on...

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...

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...

The East Asian miracle was real. Prior to the 1997 economic and currency crises, Asian NICs Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan achieved remarkable annual GDP growth. In these countries the overall economic performance was significantly determined by the industrial development triggered by...

To facilitate the transformation of the German economy from the traditional manufacturing industries towards emerging new technologies, a new segment of the Frankfurt exchange was introduced in 1997 - Der Neue Markt. This study provides evidence that not only did many new firms obtain funding...

Motivated by the process of economic development in Eastern Germany since the German reunification we set up a dynamic macroeconomic model of a small open economy where both capital and labor are mobile and there are increasing returns to scale at the aggregate level. The model features multiple...