We study the effect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques,we match triennial population data for roughly 1000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussiato georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We find positive short- andlong-term effects of having a station...

In January 2005 the German Supreme Court permitted the state governments to chargetuition fees. By exploiting the natural experiment, we examine how government ideologyinfluenced the introduction of tuition fees. The results show that rightwing governmentswere active in introducing tuition fees....

Principal-agent problems can arise when preferences of voters are not aligned with preferences of political representatives. Often the consequence of the political principalagentproblem is political catering to special interests. In this paper I provide examples of principal-agent problems...

We investigate empirically how party ideology influences size and scope of government as measured by the size of government, tax structure and labor market regulation. Our dataset comprises 49 US states over the 1993–2009 period. We employ the new data onthe ideological mapping of US...

This paper investigates the impact of broadband availability on economic activity as measured by local employment rates. Using panel data on broadband coverage in 8,460 West German municipalities for the period from 2005 to 2009, we find, in fixed effectsregressions, an overall positive, but...

Deutschland wurde bereits zweimal, 1966–1969 und 2005–2009, von einer großen Koalition regiert. Deskriptive Zeitreihenanalysen wirtschaftspolitischer Kennzahlen zeigen nicht auf, dass es unter diesen großen Koalitionen signifikante Kurswechsel in der Wirtschaftspolitik gab. Qualitative...

We study with a sample of 1,070 primary school children, aged seven to eleven years,how altruism in a donation experiment is related to children’s risk attitudes and intertemporalchoices. Examining such a relationship is motivated by theories of reciprocalaltruism that provide a cornerstone to...

This paper evaluates a school reform in Bavaria that moved the timing of tracking in low- and middle-track schools from grade 6 to grade 4; students in high-track schools were not affected. To eliminate state specific and school-type-specific shocks, I estimate a triple-differences model using...

In this paper we analyze the impact of the expectations about future labor income on thesaving behavior of German households. We measure expectations on an individual basisinstead of generalized risk measures as it is common in existing studies. We use aunique panel data set on household...

I investigate how government ideology and globalization are associated with top income shares in 16 OECD countries over the period 1970 to 2010. I use the new World Top Incomes Database. Globalization is measured by the KOF index of globalization. The results show that the top 1% income share...