Abstract: Warum sind Immobilien in bestimmten Gemeinden teurer als in anderen und welche lokalen Einflussfaktoren bestimmen die Immobilienpreise? Unterscheiden sich Immobilienpreise zwischen Gemeinden aufgrund von unterschiedlichen lokalen Steuern und haben derartige Preisunterschiede über...

Contrary to previous findings, we find a systematic and economically sizeable relationship between income levels and life expectancy in a panel dataset of 197 countries over 213 years. By itself, GDP/capita explains more than 64 percent of the variation in life expectancy. The Preston curve...

Usually, studies analyzing terrorism focus on the total number of casualties or attacks in a given county. However, per capita rates of terrorism are more likely to matter for individual welfare. Analyzing 214 countries from 1970 - 2014, we show that three stylized findings are overturned in...

We analyze a constitutional change in the German State of Bavaria where citizens, not politicians, granted themselves more say in politics at the local level through a constitutional initiative at the state level. This institutional setting allows us to focus on revealed preferences for direct...

We study the effect of temperature on economic development on the sub-national level, employing cross-sectional data for up to 15,533 sub-national units from two distinct sources. In contrast to the existing cross-country literature on the temperature-income relationship, our setting allows us...

The literature suggests that the household invests in the human capital of a child member not only for altruistic reasons but also as insurance against future income shocks. Hence, the allocation of the child's time between school and work is a function of the risk preference of the household...

A pandemic is not only a biological event and a public health disaster, but it also generates impacts that are worth understanding from a societal, historical, and cultural perspective.In this contribution, we argue that as the disease spreads, we are able to harness a valuable key resource,...

Behavioural responses to pandemics are less shaped by actual mortality or hospitalization risks than they are by risk attitudes. We explore human mobility patterns as a measure of behavioural responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results indicate a strong negative relationship between...

Although science has been an incredibly powerful and revolutionary force, it is not clear whether science is suited to performance under pressure; generally, science achieves best in its usual comfort zone of patience, caution, and slowness. But if science is organized knowledge and acts as a...