In times of high and persistent unemployment, it has become one of the most important policy tasks in many developed countries to trigger a process of sustained employment growth. An illustrative example is the policy of regional "growth-poles”, which assumes that a local concentration of a...

In this paper I analyze the impact of initial human capital on subsequent city employment growth for the case of West Germany (1977-2002). I find robust evidence that skilled local areas have grown stronger than unskilled ones. But this observed positive relation need not indicate a localized...

In this paper we show that the double Pareto lognormal (DPLN) parameterization provides an excellent fit to the overall US city size distribution, regardless of whether 'cities' are administratively defined Census places as in Eeckhout (2004) or economically defined area clusters as in Rozenfeld...

The unprecedented economic rise of Eastern Europe and China in the last two decades has triggered concerns in developed Western market economies about adverse effects for domestic labor markets trough increased import competition. Simultaneously, exports from developed countries to these new...

In this paper we take a detailed look at the sectoral anatomy of regional growth in German regions over the period 1978-2008. In the aggregate, the German economy is characterized by a secular decline of the manufacturing sector and a rise of the modern service economy. This trend of structural...

We analyze the first data set on consistently defined functional urban areas in Europe and compare the European to the US urban system. City sizes in Europe do not follow a power law: the largest cities are ?too small? to follow Zipf?s law.

This paper addresses the impact of rising international trade exposure on individual earnings profiles in heterogeneous worker-establishment matches. We exploit rich panel data on job biographies of manufacturing workers in Germany, and apply a high-dimensional fixed effects approach to analyze...

Standard models of the new trade and location theories usually assume full employment and are thus ill-equipped to study spatial unemployment differences, which in reality are more pronounced that income disparities. Regional labour market theories like the ´wage curve´-approach on the other...

Wir untersuchen die Auswirkungen des beispiellosen Anstiegs des internationalen Handels zwischen Deutschland und dem Osten - China und Osteuropa - im Zeitraum 1988-2008 auf lokale Arbeitsmärkte in Deutschland. Anhand von administrativen Daten nutzen wir die regionale Variation der...

Using comprehensive data for German establishments, we estimate plant-evel production functions to analyze if cultural diversity affects total factor productivity. We distinguish diversity in the establishment's workforce and in the aggregate labor force of the region where the plant is located....