The paper aims at testing Florida's concept of the Creative Class using panel data for 323 West German regions for the time period 1975-2004. We apply two different es-timation methods, a panel VAR for the complete data set and a dynamic system ap-proach based on GMM for a modified data set...

We use a 100% sample of social security panel micro data for estimating the effects of a minimum wage in the German construction sector. In 1997, a wage floor was introduced at different rates in West and East Germany. For analysing the impact of this natural experiment we conceptually follow a...

The paper aims at testing Florida's concept of the Creative Class using panel data for 323 West German regions for the time period 1975 - 2004. Applying a dynamic system approach based on GMM, we find that the local concentration of the Creative Class has predictive power for the economic...