Many international organizations, governments and academics concerned with economic development look to Asia’s success, recommending that other poor countries follow similar models and paths of development. This study argues that such Asian ‘lesson-making’ is a grave mistake in policy-thinking—and in the historical understanding of the nature and process of development. In identifying what we c...

Real Wage Cyclicality in Germany and the UK: New Results Using Panel Data This paper compares the cyclical behaviour of male real wages in Germany and the UK using the German Socio-Economic Panel 1984-2002 and the British Household Panel Survey 1991-2004. We distinguish between job stayers (remaining in the same job), and withinand between-company job movers. Stayers are the large majority in b...

The Economic Costs of Mass Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany* Based on official records from the former East German Ministry for State Security, we quantify the long-term costs of state surveillance on social capital and economic performance. Using county-level variation in the spy density in the 1980s, we exploit discontinuities at state borders to show that higher level...

A Portrait of Child Poverty in Germany This paper offers a descriptive portrait of income poverty among children in Germany between the early 1980s and 2001, with a focus on developments since unification in 1991. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel are used to estimate poverty rates, rates of entry to and exit from poverty, and the duration of time spent in and out of poverty. The analys...

There are large deviations in access to telecommunications infrastructure and trading patterns within the East Asian region. We examine how the network externalities of communication activities and trading opportunities interact to determine the structure of comparative advantage. These interactions are examined by constructing a simple two-country, two-good model of trade involving a country-s...

Does Democracy Foster Trust? The level of trust inherent in a society is important for a wide range of microeconomic and macroeconomic outcomes. This paper investigates how individuals’ attitudes toward social and institutional trust are shaped by the political regime in which they live. The German reunification is a unique natural experiment that allows us to conduct such a study. Using data f...

20 Years of German Unification: Evidence on Income Convergence and Heterogeneity We analyse the convergence and heterogeneity of living standards between East and West Germany since unification. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we compare total individual income of permanent adult residents, including retirees and the unemployed, of East and West Germany over the fift...

The goals of democratic competition are not only to give implement a majority's preference on policy questions, but also to provide a deterrent against corrupt abuse of power by political leaders. We consider a simple model of multicandidate elections in which different electoral systems can be compared according to these two criteria. Among a wide class of singlewinner scoring rules, only appr...

We extend the ‘no-haggling’ result of Riley and Zeckhauser (1983) to the class of linear multiproduct monopoly problems when the buyer’s valuations are smoothly distributed. In particular we show that there is no loss for the seller in optimizing over mechanisms such that all allocations belong to the boundary of the feasible set. The set of potentially optimal mechanisms can be further restric...

This paper examines the causal effects of a major change in the German parental leave benefit scheme on fertility. I use the unanticipated reform in 2007 to assess how a move from a means-tested to an earnings-related benefit affects higher-order births. By using the German Mikrozensus 2010, I find that the reform significantly affected the timing of higher-order births in the first three years...