The second and third generation of immigrants have been the centre of a lively debate about the economic integration of immigrants into their host societies, but there is little empirical evidence on the German case. In this study I comprehensively portray the labour market outcomes of second...

In contrast to West-Germany, illicit drugs were virtually absent in East-Germany until 1990. Yet, after the collapse of the former GDR, East-Germany was expected to encounter a sharp increase in the prevalence of substance abuse. By analyzing individual data, we find that East-Germany largely...

We use the European Community Household Panel, a harmonized data set covering the countries of the European Union, to provide detailed estimates of the returns to education. Our results can be summarized as follows. Firstly, average returns to education have been mostly stable during the second...

In this paper, we estimate a small New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model for Germany for the period from 1975 to 1998 and use it to identify the structural shocks, which have driven the business cycle. For this purpose we apply indirect inference methods, that is we...

Studies on the effect of ageing on health care expenditures (HCE) have revealed the importance of controlling for time-to-death (TTD). These studies, however, are subject to possible endogeneity if HCE influences remaining life expectancy. This paper introduces a ten year observational period on...

Deductibles in health insurance are often regarded as a means to contain health care costs when individuals exhibit moral hazard. However, in the absence of moral hazard, voluntarily chosen deductibles may instead lead to self-selection into different insurance contracts. We use a set of new...

In this paper we argue that future inflation in an economy depends on the way people perceive current inflation, their inflation sentiment. We construct some simple measures of inflation sentiment which capture whether price acceleration is shared by many components of the CPI basket. In a...