Recent work has started to analyze the choice of international commodity tax base under conditions of imperfect competition. This paper focuses on the effects of changing levels of trade barriers in a model where firms engage in duopoly competition and governments set commodity taxes...

Across Prussian counties and towns, Protestantism led to more schooling already in 1816, before the Industrial Revolution. This supports a human capital theory of Protestant economic history and rules out a Weberian explanation of Protestant education just resulting from industrialization.

Frequently, international environmental negotiations have been analyzed in two-agent (2 × 2) games. Yet, in order to involve additional strategies, (3 × 3) games gained attention recently. We employ such a (3 × 3) game setting in order to depict international negotiations on climate change...

Mit der von der Bundesregierung in Auftrag gegebenen Gesamtevaluation ehe- und familienbezogener Leistungen wurden erstmals zentrale Instrumente der deutschen Familienpolitik systematisch und umfassend evaluiert. Dabei wurden folgende familienpolitische Ziele vorgegeben: die Sicherung der...

We incorporate the concept of social identity into entrepreneurship and analyze the determinants of having entrepreneurial intentions. We argue that an entrepreneurial identity results from an individual’s socialization. This could be parental influence but, as argued in this paper, also peer...

We analyze how foreign direct investment (FDI) affects employment security. Using administrative micro data for German employees allows us to follow individual workers over time. FDI intensity is measured at the sectoral level, which enables us to take into account direct as well as indirect...

This paper reviews empirical evidence, especially from Europe, on how education and training policies can be designed to advance both efficiency and equity. Returns to educational investments tend to decrease over the life cycle. Moreover, they are the highest for disadvantaged children at early...

We study the effect of cultural ties on economic exchange using a novel measure for cultural identity: dialects. We evaluate linguistic micro-data from a unique language survey conducted between 1879 and 1888 in about 45,000 German schools. The recorded geography of dialects comprehensively...

The paper offers theoretical and empirical evaluations of the 1997 German tax reform from the viewpoint of international tax competition. Has Germany done the right thing to improve its competitive position? To answer this question the paper distinguishes between investment whose return is taxed...