Spillovers of prosocial motivation are crucial for the formation of social capital. They facilitate interactions among individuals and create social multipliers that amplify the effects of policy interventions. We conducted a large-scale intervention study among dyads of blood donors to...

This paper examines how skills are shaped by social interactions in families. We show that older siblings causally affect younger sibling's education choices and early career earnings. We focus on critical course choices in high school and overcome the identification challenges of estimating...

Existing results on the contribution of terms of trade and world interest rate shocks to output fluctuations in small open economies range from less than 10% to almost 90%. We argue that an identification problems lies at the heart of these vastly different results. In this paper, we overcome...

Using aggregate data, the paper analyzes the importance of inventory investment for German business cycles since 1960. In contrast to U.S. experience, the traditional productionsmoothing/ buffer-stock model is not rejected by empirical evidence. Preliminary national accounts data of inventory...

Globalization has effected business cycle developments in OECD countries and has increased activities of firms across national borders. This paper analyzes whether these two developments are linked. We use a new firm-level dataset on the foreign activities of German firms to test whether foreign...