Keeping up with rapid technological change necessitates constant innovation. Successful innovation depends on both incumbent workers’ knowledge, based on experience, and knowledge about the latest technologies, along with the skills needed to implement them. Both of these knowledge-based...

This paper evaluates the impact of relocations of public employment across cities on private sector activity. To identify the effect of changes in public employment on the private sector, we exploit the relocation of the German Federal Government from Berlin to Bonn in the wake of the Second...

Why are better educated and more risk-friendly persons more mobile across regions? To answer this question, we use micro-data on internal migrants from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 2000–2006 and merge this information with a unique proxy for region-pair-specific cultural distances...

This paper analyzes the effects on voting behavior of information disseminated over the Internet. We address endogeneity in Internet availability by exploiting regional and technological peculiarities of the preexisting voice telephony network that hindered the roll-out of fixed-line...

This paper analyses the effects on voting behavior of information disseminated over the Internet. We address endogeneity in Internet availability by exploiting regional and technological peculiarities of the preexisting voice telephony network that hindered the roll-out of fixed-line...

Why are better educated and more risk-friendly persons more mobile across regions? To answer this question, we use micro data on internal migrants from the German Socio- Economic Panel (SOEP) 2000-2006 and merge this information with a unique proxy for region-pair-specific cultural distances...

We provide empirical evidence that the experience of a socialist regime leads to a lack of self-reliance by comparing East and West Germans conditional on regional differences in current economic development. This meaningful lack of self-reliance persists after the regime's breakdown and hinders...

We ask whether and what kind of unique factors influence the innovativeness of firms in clusters across geographic regions and industrial sectors. We provide evidence for the driving forces of firm innovativeness in different cluster types. Distinguishing between hierarchical clusters of mature...

Globalization has had an enormous impact on traditional industrial structures. It almost seems that everything is everywhere the same. And yet, in reality, some regions in a single industrialized country enjoy rapid economic growth while others are downsizing or stagnating. Thus there must be...