This paper shows that 19th-century industrialization is an important determinant of the significant changes in Germany’s economic geography observed in recent decades. Using novel data on economic activity in 163 labor market regions in West Germany, we establish that nearly half of them...

With 70 million dead, World War II remains the most devastating conflict in history. Of the survivors, millions were displaced, returned maimed from the battlefield, or spent years in captivity. We examine the impact of such wartime experiences on labor market careers and show that they often...

We investigate the matching algorithm used by the German central clearinghouse for university admissions (ZVS) in medicine and related subjects. This mechanism consists of three procedures based on final grades from school ("Abiturbestenverfahren", "Auswahlverfahren der Hochschulen") and on...

The Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan in March 2011 caused a fundamental change in Germanys energy policy which led to the immediate shut down of nearly half of its nuclear power plants. Using data from Germanys largest internet platform for real estate and employing a...

This paper studies how the local environment in receiving counties affected the economic, social, and political integration of the eight million expellees who arrived in West Germany after World War II. We first document that integration outcomes differed dramatically across West German...

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 specific factors model, in which...