Countries' capital account policies might be contagious in the sense that domestic policies are driven by other countries' policies. A model of strategic interactions is developed to show that countries' best response to policy changes elsewhere consists in imitating this policy. Using a spatial...

Most German states have reformed university preparatory schooling by reducing duration from 13 to 12 years with unchanged graduation requirements. The reform was implemented in the states during the last decade in several consecutive years. In this paper, we use nationwide data on high school...

This paper analyzes the impact of shortening the duration of secondary schooling on the accumulation of human capital. In 2003, an educational policy reform was enacted in Saxony-Anhalt, a German state, providing a natural experimental setting. The thirteenth year of schooling was eliminated for...

An important education reform in Germany reduced the duration of university preparatory schooling from 13 to 12 years, but left the curriculum unchanged. In the state of Saxony-Anhalt the reform was completed in 2007 with a double cohort of graduates, providing a natural experiment. We use...

Studies report that economic inequality remained relatively stable since the second world war until the 1980s (Lemieux, 2008). However, in the 1980s and 1990s several studies reveal an upward trend in inequality in many countries (Lemieux, 2008). The vast majority of studies analyse inequality...

Empirical evaluations of national minimum wages, such as in Germany or the UK, rely on bite measures that capture treatment variation; measured from the incidence (or intensity) of employees paid below the threshold before the minimum wage was introduced or raised. Bite-dependent estimations...

This paper tests empirically for welfare competition between the 439 German counties. The first contribution of this paper is to provide evidence that the intensity of competition is sensitive to the degree of autonomy that local authorities have over their welfare policies. Using a major reform...

We analyze the allocation of talent across teams in large matching markets with competition for rank. We show that under general conditions globalization in the form of a convex transformation of payoffs promotes the concentration of talent, i.e. it makes positive assortative matching more...

Smartphones such as iPhones and Android was introduced to the market around 2007-9 in various OECD member countries. Since then, the transformation of the market was observed, which include (i) rapid growth of mobile broadband (3G+4G); (ii) severer market competition; and (iii) upheaval of...

This study aims at unveiling regional development differences in Norway with respect to various natural resource-based activities that take place in the NUTS3 regions. Norway?s natural riches range from agricultural and forest resources to fisheries, mines, petroleum and gas. Considering the...