The German Economy is not only affected by the Unification of Germany but by a significant influx of immigrants from abroad and huge migration from East to West Germany around the date of unification. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) allows to disentangle those effects by decomposition of the Theil I (0)-Index of inequality. In addition, the paper offers insights in the t...

This paper investigates the impact of stock markets and banks on economic growth using a panel data set for the period 1976-98 and applying recent GMM techniques developed for dynamic panels. On balance, we find that stock markets and banks positively influence economic growth and these findings are not due to potential biases induced by simultaneity, omitted variables or unobserved country-spe...

Much progress has been made in recent years in developing and applying a direct measure of utility using survey questions on satisfaction with income and with life in general. In this paper we apply this new type of measurement to the study of money illusion. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 1993 to 2003, we cannot reject the hypothesis of no money illusion. JEL Cla...

This paper proposes a new unit root test in the context of a random autoregressive coefficient panel data model, in which the null of a unit root corresponds to the joint restriction that the autoregressive coefficient has unit mean and zero variance. The asymptotic distribution of the test statistic is derived and simulation results are provided to suggest that it performs very well in small s...

Not the Opium of the People: Income and Secularization in a Panel of Prussian Counties The interplay between religion and the economy has occupied social scientists for long. We construct a unique panel of income and Protestant church attendance for six waves of up to 175 Prussian counties spanning 1886-1911. The data reveal a marked decline in church attendance coinciding with increasing incom...

This paper analyzes how access to imported inputs affects firms in developing countries, where domestically produced high-quality inputs are relatively costly. We build an O-Ring type model with quality complementarity across input tasks, ranking tasks by their qualitysensitivity. Because high-quality inputs are relatively cheap in international markets, firms use these instead of domestic inpu...

Smoking Persistence Across Countries: An Analysis Using Semi-Parametric Dynamic Panel Data Models with Selectivity We study smoking persistence in ten countries using data from the European Community Household Panel. Such persistence may be due to true state dependence but may also reflect individual unobserved heterogeneity. We distinguish between the two by using semiparametric dynamic panel ...

It has been argued that the most likely explanation for the result that earnings rise with firm size is that large firms employ high-ability individuals. In this paper we use matched employer-employee panel data from Ghana and Kenya and test for firm size effects in earnings regressions whilst controlling for unobserved ability in the form of worker fixed effects. For both countries we obtain a...

We use a money pump argument to measure deviations from the revealed preference axioms. Using a panel data set of food expenditures, we find a large number of violations of the weak axiom of revealed preference. The money pump costs are small, which indicate that the violations of revealed preference are not severe. While most households’ behavior deviates from rationality, by our measure they ...

This paper investigates whether knowledge accumulating activities, such as exporting, R&D, or worker training, can enhance plants’ productivity. To this end we use plant level panel data for Irish manufacturing. Our results importantly indicate that productivity enhancing effects of these factors are found only for domestic firms, but not for foreign multinationals located in Ireland. We postul...