Political regimes influence the contents of education and the criteria used to select and evaluate students. We study the impact of a socialist education on the likelihood of obtaining a college degree, as well as on several labor market outcomes, by exploiting the reorganization of the school...

Mutual aid among villagers in developing countries often is the sole possibility to insure against economic shocks. By using field laboratory experiments in Cambodian villages we study social cohesion in newly resettled and established communities which are both part of a land distribution...

This paper investigates the effect of market size on innovation activities across different durable good industries in the Chinese manufacturing sector. We use a potential market size measure driven only by changes in the Chinese income distribution which is exogenous to changes in prices and...

In this paper, we show that large inflows into commodity investments, a recent phenomenon known as financialization, has changed the behavior and dependence structure between commodities and the general stock market. The common perception is that the increase in comovements is the result of...

Start-up subsidies for the unemployed have become an important part of Active Labor Market Policy (ALMP) in many countries. Previous evaluation results show pre-dominantly (very) positive results indicating that these programs are an effective way to increase employment probabilities and income...

In 2005, the unemployment compensation for long-term unemployed was reduced in Germany. We examine how this reform affected the transition probability to employment. Additionally, we inspect how this effect varies over unemployment duration. We estimate proportional hazard models using German...

Reference prices constitute a main determinant of patient health care reimbursement in many countries. We study the effects of a change from an "external" (based on a basket of prices in other countries) to an "internal" (based on comparable domestic products) reference price system. We find...

This paper analyses the influence of in-house R&D and external knowledge acquisition on the total factor productivity (TFP) of listed Chinese firms for the time period 2001-2010. We find a quantitatively important positive effect of in-house R&D. The achieved level of technological...

Using both household and linked-employer-employee data we study the effects of works councils on individual sickness absence rates and a subjective measure of personnel problems due to absenteeism in Germany. We find that the existence of a works council is positively correlated with the...

Multinational companies can exploit the tax advantage of debt more aggressively than national companies. Besides utilizing the standard debt tax shield, multinationals can shift debt from affiliates in low-tax countries to affiliates in high-tax countries. We study the capital structure of...