The notion of face-to-face contacts has recently become very popular in regional economics and in economic geography. This is the most obvious way to explain why firms still locate in proximity to others after the "death of distance", i.e., the shrinking costs for transportation, especially...

Weck-Hannemann (2000) has argued that the sciences differ in the opportunity costs of temporary leave for child raising, determining the fields which women choose for their academic careers. This article argues that this point should be supplemented by other explanations which are at least as...

Many advocates of an active regional economic policy tend to consider regional sectoral concentration as something which can be created, as a recipe rather than just a development which sometimes occurs and sometimes not. Whether such a policy can be successful implicitly depends on a number of...

This paper reports on an experiment of corruption that was conducted in two treatments: one with the possibility of detection and one without. It turns out that monitoring reduces corruption through deterrence; at the same time, it destroys the intrinsic motivation for honesty. Thus the net effect...

This paper looks back on the first ten years of empirical corruption research, which started with Mauro's seminal paper in 1995. The previous theoretical discussion did not reach unanimous conclusions on whether corruption is harmful or not; the arguments are briefly sketched. International...

Why are women regarded to be more resistant towards corruption? We address this question by letting students allotted the role of public servants receive a bribe and choose between reporting (whistleblowing), opportunism and reciprocity (delivery of a contract to the briber). Those acting as...

Economic page turners like Freakonomics are well written and there is much to be learned from them – not only about economics, but also about writing techniques. Their authors know how to build up suspense, i.e., they make readers want to know what comes. An uncountable number of pages in...

Das ifo Institut hat im letzten Jahr zusammen mit dem Deutschen Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung in Berlin im Auftrag des damaligen Bundesministeriums für Wirtschaft und Arbeit, BMWA (heutiges Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie, BMWT) eine Studie zu den möglichen Auswirkungen...