Dass Menschen von sozialen Kontakten auch bei wirtschaftlichen Aktivitäten profitieren, weiß so mancher aus eigener Erfahrung. Aber können soziale Kontakte das Wachstum ganzer Regionen beflügeln? In der Studie wird argumentiert, dass die deutsche Geschichte die seltene Chance bietet, den...

We use the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to show that personal relationships which individuals maintain for non-economic reasons can be an important determinant of regional economic growth. We show that West German households who have social ties to East Germany in 1989 experience a persistent...

We use the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to show that personal relationships which individuals maintain for non-economic reasons can be an important determinant of regional economic growth. We show that West German households who have social ties to East Germany in 1989 experience a persistent...

We use 130 years of data on historical migrations to the United States to show a causal effect of the ancestry composition of US counties on foreign direct investment (FDI) sent and received by local firms. To isolate the causal effect of ancestry on FDI, we build a simple reduced-form model of...

We use 130 years of data on historical migrations to the United States to show a causal effect of the ancestry composition of US counties on foreign direct investment (FDI) sent and received by local firms. To isolate the causal effect of ancestry on FDI, we build a simple reduced-form model of...

We show a causal impact of immigration on innovation and growth in US counties. To identify the causal impact of immigration, we use 130 years of detailed data on migrations from foreign countries to US counties to isolate quasi-random variation in the ancestry composition of US counties;...

Dass Menschen von sozialen Kontakten auch bei wirtschaftlichen Aktivitäten profitieren, weiß so mancher aus eigener Erfahrung. Aber können soziale Kontakte das Wachstum ganzer Regionen beflügeln? In der Studie wird argumentiert, dass die deutsche Geschichte die seltene Chance bietet, den...

Improving accountability in public services has been a central ob-jective of many public sector reforms in recent years. Chief amongthese have been efforts to generate observable performance measuresas a basis for monitoring performance. This paper examines a nat-ural experiment in regimes...