Using a repeated cross-section of more than 258,000 residents of 39 European countries covering the period from 1990 to 2012, I study the impact of knowing different foreign languages on income and (for the first time) on unemployment. To help identify causal effects, I also employ a novel...

This paper looks at the e ffect of cultural barriers on the skill selection of international migration. The data covers bilateral migration stocks by skill level in 2000 from about 99 sending countries to the main 15 destination countries. We use genetic distance as a proxy for cultural distance...

Trust in the citizens of a potential partner country may affect the decision to trade with or to migrate to a foreign country. This paper employs panel data to examine the causal impact of such bilateral trust on international trade and migration patterns. We apply instrumental variables (IV)...

The paper describes the exchange program in between the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee and the University of Potsdam in the field of economics. It discusses in detail the development of the program, including the problems and challenges. Additionally a brief description of the curriculum is...

Ethnic groups tend to agglomerate and assemble, mostly in urban areas. While ethnic clustering is critically debated in societies and the consequences for economic outcomes are under debate in research, the process is not yet well understood. A separate literature has also examined the cultural...

Over millennia, mankind has used hard cash in various forms ranging from shells to gold coins and paper. More recently, cash has become unpopular in political circles, as it effectively restricts states’ power to tax (explicitly or via negative interest rates) or to survey and potentially...

We demonstrate that upward-looking comparisons induce "keeping up with the richer Joneses"-behavior. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the effect of reference consumption, defined as the consumption level of all households who are perceived to be richer, on household...

One important parameter in the decision process when buying a private annuity is individuals' subjective life expectancy, because it directly infuences the expected rate of return. We examine the market for private annuities in Germany and evaluate potential selection effects based on subjective...

Based on the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP), we show that household consumption drops and saving rises significantly within four years after a child moves out of a household. Per capita consumption of parents is approximately leveled up to that of childless peers after all children are gone....

Das 1. Symposium für Ökonomie im Gartenbau fand am 27. November 2013 in der Paulinerkirche in Göttingen statt. Es wurde als Kooperation der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, des Thünen- Instituts für Betriebswirtschaft und des Agrarkompetenznetzes WeGa durchgeführt. Die Veranstaltung...