Do politically administered mass layoffs undermine trust and political interest? During the German reunification, formerly state-owned socialist firms in East Germany were privatized by the Treuhand, which came at the cost of massive job losses and public protest. I demonstrate that these...

This paper exploits the idiosyncratic line of contact separating Allied and Soviet troops within East Germany at the end of WWII to study political resistance in a non-democracy. When Nazi Germany surrendered, 40% of what would become the authoritarian German Democratic Republic was initially...

Die vorliegende Studie basiert auf einem Gutachten, das zusammen mit dem Leibniz-Institut für ökologische Raumentwicklung (IÖR) und Prof. Gesine Marquardt, Inhaberin des Lehrstuhls für Sozial- und Gesundheitsbauten der Technischen Universität (TU) Dresden, für das Bundesministerium für...

This paper deals with the privatization, restructuring, and liquidation of East German industrial firms. A partnership model is suggested for privatization where the Government’s property trust (Treuhandanstait (THA)) is made a silent partner of the private investors. The application of a...

This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person's actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical...

In this article, I analyze the changes in wage inequality in the eastern region, western region and reunified Germany a decade after reunification. For that purpose, I use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the period 1999 - 2006, and implement the decomposition methodologies of...

Despite poor regional labour market conditions East Germans exhibit a rather limited willing-ness of leaving their home region. Applying an IV ordered probit approach and using the German Socio Economic Panel (SOEP), we test a local network explanation of lower spatial mobility. Firstly, we find...

In this paper it is argued that locus of control beliefs and preferences concerning state action negatively affect the formation of new firms in former socialist countries. For this purpose Kirzner's theory of costless entrepreneurship is reviewed and criticized. German reunification, in which...

Does the Internet undermine social capital or facilitate inter-personal and civic engagement in the real world? Merging unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data, we investigate how broadband Internet affects several dimensions of social capital. One...