Compared to other European countries rental apartments dominate the German housing market. Policymakers and a large part of the population alike worry about the amount of affordable living space. Especially in metropolitan areas a high demand for living space exists and has been leading to a...

In this paper I analyze the relationship between unemployment and criminal activity. Using a unique panel data set on German counties covering the years 2003 to 2009, I estimate the effect of unemployment on crime rates for different kind of offenses. I extensively control for potential...

In light of the remarkable number of young people who pass through a period of temp work at the beginning of their career the question arises whether labor market entry via temporary work agency (TWA) employment has any (persistent) effects on labor market outcomes. We investigate this issue...

This paper makes use of Hierarchical Bayes Models to model and estimate spatial health effects. We focus on Germany, combining rich individual-level household panel data with administrative county level information to estimate spatial county-level health dependencies. As dependent variable, we...

Economists have a long tradition in identifying the evolution of cooperation in large, unstructured societies as a puzzle. We suggest a new explanation for cooperation which avoids restrictions of most previous attempts. Our explanation deals with the role of internalized norms for cooperation...

In this paper, we assess the impact of firms introducing part-time work schemes for gradual labour market exit of elderly workers on their employees labour market outcomes. The analysis is based on unique linked employer-employee data that combine high-quality survey and administrative data. Our...

In many federations, fiscal equalization schemes soften fiscal imbalances across the member states. Such schemes usually imply that a member state internalizes only a small fraction of the additional tax revenue from an expansion of the state-specific tax base, while the remainder of the...

Successful innovation is a precondition for economic prosperity. While various potential determinants of innovative activity have been considered, little empirical evidence is yet available for the influence of firm governance issues. This paper aims at filling this gap in the literature by...

In this paper, I analyze the impact of the extension of the ECB s collateral framework on securities sales. In addition, I evaluate the impact of different macroeconomic and bank-specific characteristics on banks selling behavior. At this, I distinguish between healthy banks and banks rescued...

We provide an overidentification test for a nonparametric treatment model where individuals are allowed to select into treatment based on unobserved gains. Our test can be used to test the validity of instruments in a framework with essential heterogeneity (Imbens and Angrist 1994). The...