Results

CEP discussion paper

Migration and innovation: the impact of East German investors on West Germany's technological development

We investigate the causal relationship between inventor migration and regional innovation in the context of the large-scale migration shock from East to West Germany between World War II and the construction of the Berli...Read more...

Journal article

PLoS ONE :

Access to digital finance: Equity crowdfunding across countries and platforms

Financing entrepreneurship spurs innovation and economic growth. Digital financial platforms that crowdfund equity for entrepreneurs have emerged globally, yet they remain poorly understood. We model equity crowdfunding ...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics :

Micro-geographic property price and rent indices

We develop a programming algorithm that predicts a balanced-panel mix-adjusted house price index for arbitrary spatial units from repeated cross-sections of geocoded micro data. The algorithm combines parametric and non-...Read more...

Journal article

Psychological Science:

Feeling good is feeling better

Can people remember their past happiness? We analyzed data from four longitudinal surveys from the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany spanning from the 1970s until the present, in which more than 60,0...Read more...

Journal article

Nature Communications:

The effect of Covid certificates on vaccine uptake, health outcomes, and the economy

In the COVID-19 pandemic many countries required COVID certificates, proving vaccination, recovery, or a recent negative test, to access public and private venues. We estimate their effect on vaccine uptake for France, G...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Optimal minimum wages

We develop a quantitative spatial model with heterogeneous firms and a monopsonistic labour market to derive minimum wages that maximize employment or welfare. Quantifying the model for German micro regions, we find that...Read more...

Blog

LSE European Politics:

Evidence from East Germany: how young people's education plans are shaped by their environment

The decision to go to university can have a major impact on an individual's financial future and quality of life. Yet we know relatively little about how these decisions are made and adapted within different contexts. Dr...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

Discrimination, managers, and firm performance: evidence from ?Aryanizations? in Nazi Germany

Large-scale increases in discrimination can lead to dismissals of highly qualified managers. We investigate how expulsions of senior Jewish managers, due to rising discrimination in Nazi Germany, affected large corporati...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

East-side story: historical pollution and persistent neighborhood sorting

Why are the east sides of formerly industrial cities more deprived? To answer this question, we use individual-level census data and create historical pollution patterns derived from the locations of 5,000 industrial chi...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

The impact of public employment: evidence from West Germany's post-war capital Bonn

Raising the level of public employment is a frequently used policy instrument to support economically lagging regions. This column evaluates the impact of changes in public employment on private sector activity using the...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Measuring the economic costs of discrimination: insights from Nazi Germany

Kilian Huber and colleagues analyse the effects of the Nazis' purge of Jewish managers from German firms....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Discrimination, managers, and firm performance: evidence from ?Aryanizations? in Nazi Germany

Large-scale increases in discrimination can lead to dismissals of highly qualified managers. We investigate how expulsions of senior Jewish managers, due to rising discrimination in Nazi Germany, affected large corporati...Read more...

Journal article

Economics Letters:

The regional effects of Germany's national minimum wage

We show that the minimum wage introduced in Germany in 2015 led to spatial wage convergence, in particular in the left tail of the distribution, without reducing relative employment in low-wage regions within the first t...Read more...

Journal article

Scientific Reports:

In search of features that constitute an "enriched environment" in humans: associations between geographical properties and brain structure

Enriched environments elicit brain plasticity in animals. In humans it is unclear which environment is enriching. Living in a city has been associated with increased amygdala activity in a stress paradigm, and being brou...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Does management matter in schools?

We collect data on management practices in over 1,800 high schools in eight countries. We show that higher management quality is strongly associated with better educational outcomes. The UK, Sweden, Canada and the US obt...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The future of the German industrial relations model

The paper examines recent evidence on the erosion of the German industrial relations model. Although its coverage has declined, much of this has occurred in smaller and newer establishments, and compared with Britain, it...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Unemployment in the Great Recession

This paper studies the responses of unemployment in Germany, the USA and the UK to the Great Recession of 2008-9 using Beveridge curve analysis, and in the entire OECD using other techniques. It is shown that the UK suff...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The German Transfer Problem, 1920-1933: A Sovereign Debt Perspective

The severity of the Great Depression in Germany has sometimes been blamed on reparations in simplistic fashion. Alternative interpretations relied on American capital exports, the demise of the Gold Standard, or on malfu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Reparations, Deficits, and Debt Default: the Great Depression in Germany

Germany?s Great Depression of the early 1930s started in 1929 with a sudden stop in the current account. It ended after a foreign debt default that unfolded in several stages from 1931 to 1933. This chapter reviews Germa...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

From Russia with Love: The Impact of Relocated Firms on Incumbent Survival

We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied z...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Union Density and Varieties of Coverage: The Anatomy of Union Wage Effects in Germany

Collective bargaining in Germany takes place either at the industry level or at the firm level; collective bargaining coverage is much higher than union density; and not all employees in a covered firm are necessarily co...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quality Matters - the Expulsion of Professors and Ph.D. Student Outcomes in Nazi Germany

I investigate the effect of faculty quality on Ph.D. student outcomes. To address the endogeneity of faculty quality I use exogenous variation provided by the expulsion of mathematics professors in Nazi Germany. I find t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Economic Situation of First- and Second-Generation Immigrants in France, Germany and the United Kingdom

A central concern about immigration is the integration into the labour market, not only of the first generation, but also of subsequent generations. Little comparative work exists for Europe?s largest economies. France, ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Peer Effects in Science - Evidence from the Dismissal of Scientists in Nazi Germany

This paper analyzes peer effects among university scientists. Specifically, it investigates whether the number of peers and their average quality affects the productivity of researchers in physics, chemistry, and mathema...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Was Germany Ever United? Evidence from Intra- and International Trade 1885-1933

This paper asks whether Germany was ever an economically integrated area. I explore the geography of trade costs in a new data set of about 40,000 observations on regional trade flows within and across the borders of Ger...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Policy Uncertainty and Precautionary Savings

In 1997 Chancellor Kohl proposed a major pension reform: he pushed the law through Parliament explaining that the German PAYG system had become unsustainable. One limitation of the new law - one that is crucial for our i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Comparatively Open: Statutory Information Disclosure for Consultation and Bargaining in Germany, France and the UK

Information provision is an important part of all mechanisms which give employees voice at work. This paper considers the law on information disclosure for joint consultation and collective bargaining in three countries,...Read more...