From 2014 onwards, Europe has witnessed an unprecedented influx of refugees. We conducted a survey experiment with almost 5,000 university students in Germany in which we randomly shifted the perception of refugees’ education level through information provision. We find that the perceived...

The German nursing home industry rapidly grows due to the permanent increase of people in need of long-term care, in particular. At the same time a large share of residents in German nursing homes is in need of social assistance. In a simple spatial competition model we show that the presence of...

This paper analyses the effects of EU regional policy transfer payments on net migration flows among the EU-28 countries. The hypothesis is tested that EU transfer payments do hamper internal migration across the EU. On the one hand, this is done by reestimating the results found by Egger,...

When based on perceived rather than on objective income distributions, the Meltzer-Richards hypothesis and the POUM hypothesis work quite well empirically: there exists a positive link between perceived inequality or perceived upward mobility and the extent of redistribution in democratic...

We show in this paper that trade in tasks can explain increasing resistance to globalization in industrialized countries. In a traditional trade model of a small open economy, we demonstrate that schooling provides protection against losses from trade if trade increases the relative price of the...

This paper will have a closer look at the role of South African welfare programs on the labour supply decision across generations. From a theoretical point of view, a change in non-labour household income will affect the decision to participate in the labour market. Previous studies have focused...

This paper investigates the impact of medical screening on individual disability insurance benefit receipt. Using a unique policy change in Switzerland, I assess the size of award errors in disability insurance and show that improvements in medical screening can substantially reduce insurance...

The aim and scope of this paper is to isolate the effects of population ageing in the context of potential Scottish independence. Fiscal challenges are often quoted as a strong argument against independence. Demographic processes play an important role in determining future economic growth via...

This paper reconsiders the theoretical foundations of EU regional policy in economics. It begins with a discussion of the line of thought of its prevalent explanation in equilibrium economics which is focusing on market failures as its key underpinning and which is the major toolkit of...

This paper reconsiders the economic explanation of EU regional policy from an evolution- ary perspective. It contrasts the neoclassical equilibrium notions of market and government failure with the prevalent evolutionary neo-Schumpeterian and Austrian-Hayekian percep- tions. Based on this...