We study the effect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques, we match triennial population data for roughly 1,000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussia to georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We find positive short- and long-term effects of having a...

Recent years have seen considerable changes in the technology of transportation with the development of high-speed rail networks, more fuel-efficient automobiles and aircraft, and the widespread adoption of informatics in disciplines such as traffic management and supply chain logistics. The...

In the paper, the sources of productivity growth are investigated by an empirical analysis with micro data for West-German manufacturing firms. The theoretical framework corresponds to an augmented growth accounting approach based on a production function. The empirical results reveal that...

Facing very modest GDP growth in Germany in 2001 and 2002, it is investigated if potential output will – as usually expected – grow by 1.5 to 2.0 percent until 2005. The incentives to work and to invest and their changes in the nineties are analyzed. Given the foreseeable changes of these...

Germany has had an extremely low growth performance since 1995. The paper looks at the long-run reasons for this loss of economic dynamics besides German unification: These include leaving labor idle, a declining share of investment in GDP, a weaker innovative activity, an ineffective system for...