This paper studies the persistence of a large, unexpected, and regionally very unevenly distributed population shock, the inflow of eight million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II. Using detailed census data from 1939 to 1970, we show that the shock had a...

Die Zahl der Flüchtlinge ist 2015 drastisch gestiegen und stellt Deutschland vor große Herausforderungen. Erleichterung erhofft man sich dadurch, dass nun auch Albanien, Kosovo und Montenegro auf die Liste der sicheren Herkunftsstaaten gesetzt wurden - wie dies vor einem Jahr für Serbien,...

National labour market institutions interact across national boundaries when product markets are global. Labour market policies can thus entail spill-overs, which suggest that there are benefits from international policy coordination. This paper studies the effects of wage subsidies in an...

Quotas for special groups of students often apply in school or university admission procedures. This paper studies the performance of two mechanisms to implement such quotas in a lab experiment. The fi rst mechanism is a simplifi ed version of the mechanism currently employed by the German...

The Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan in March 2011 caused a fundamental change in Germany's energy policy which led to the immediate shut down of nearly half of its nuclear power plants. This paper uses data from Germany's largest internet platform for real estate to investigate the effect of...

The Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan in March 2011 caused a fundamental change in Germany's energy policy which led to the immediate shut down of nearly half of its nuclear power plants. This paper uses data from Germany's largest internet platform for real estate to investigate the effect of...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...