After the collapse in early transition years, saving rates in Eastern European EU-accession countries have recovered strongly. Is private saving in these countries now driven by the same forces as in the EU? A GMM estimator is applied to analyze the determinants of private saving in both country...

We study the location of various film-related services (such as camera rental, casting agencies or pyrotechnic services), the main determinant of interest being the human capital specificity. We show that firms which supply services with a lower firm specificity locate farther away from one...

Using panel data on European regions and applying Analysis of Covariance, our study provides an empirical assessment of the relative importance of national, regional and spatial factors for explaining variations of productivity. Our analysis shows that initial economic conditions or...

Ifo-Indikatoren werden auf ihre Vorlaufeigenschaften, auf Granger-Kausalität, die Stabilität der Vorlaufbeziehung und einen Strukturbruch untersucht. Da die Ifo-Reihen noch nicht auf die neue Gliederung der amtlichen Statistik (WZ 93) umgestellt wurden, wird erstmals die Eignung der...

In the year 2000, the German government passed the most ambitious tax reform in postwar German history aiming at a significant tax relief for households. Drawing on data of the GSOEP, we analyze the distributional and fiscal effects of the tax reform. Our analysis employs microsimulation...

We analyze potential labor supply effects of a shift from the current German system of joint taxation of married couples to a system of limited real income splitting on the basis of an econometric household labor supply model embedded in a tax-benefit model. Our simulation results show...

In this paper we study the determinants of international migration to Germany, 1967-2000. The empirical literature on macro-economic migration functions usually explains migration flows by a set of explanatory variables such as the income differential, employment rates, and migrations stocks as...

Can a growing welfare state induce a regime switch in the growth rate of an economy? This paper constructs a dynamic political economy model of economic growth and the welfare state in which both variables are non-linearly related and jointly endogenous. Using a Markov switching framework over...

We analyse the effectiveness of fiscal policy rules for business cycle stabilisation in a monetary union using a quarterly macro-econometric model of Germany. The simulations compare a deficit target and an expenditure target under a range of supply, demand and fiscal shocks. Their effects are...