Land is an essential but limited natural resource. We employ the concept of stocks to analyse driving forces for land-use conversion and to assess, whether the German political "30- hectares-goal" is feasible given the current institutional setting. In this paper major driving forces for...

Recently, the channels of citizen participation in Germany with regard to governmental processes are subject to change. Classical interaction between politicians and citizens still takes place. However, there are new tools for participation at hand as well. One interesting channel that attracted...

In this paper we show that the recent model by Duranton (AER, 2007) performs remarkably well in replicating the city size distribution of West Germany, much better than the simple rank-size rule known as Zipf's law. The main mechanism of this theoretical framework is the "churning" of industries...

We analyze the decision of local governments to deploy social media. We argue that - by deploying social media - governments send a signal of modernity, transparency and openness for dialogue to their citizens. We apply a hazard model to panel data on municipalities in the German state of Hesse...

We examine how highway accessibility influences local employment outcomes. We exploit the stagewise expansion of the "Baltic Sea highway", the largest contiguous highway construction project in Germany since 1945. Results from difference-indifferences estimations and an event study approach show...

Die unterschiedliche Wirtschaftskraft und Entwicklung von Städten und ländlichen Räumen steht derzeit im Mittelpunkt vieler ökonomischer Diskussionen. Aus diesem Kontext wird zumeist eine strukturelle finanzielle Benachteiligung ländlicher Räume abgeleitet. Die Autoren untersuchen,...

The case for decentralizing taxes does not imply that these taxes need to be administered locally. Nor is it is necessarily constrained by the weakness of local tax administration. Tax decentralization and the decentralization of tax administration are related but separable decisions. As...