In this paper we exploit a cohort-specific pension reform to estimate the causal labour market effects of changes in the financial incentives to retire. In particular, we analyze the effects of the introduction of cohort-specific deductions for early retirement on female retirement, employment and unemployment. For the empirical analysis we use high-quality administrative data from the German pension ...
Entrepreneurship is a local and dynamic phenomenon. We jointly investigate spatial spillovers and time persistence of regional new business formation. Using panel data from all 402 German counties for 1996-2011, we estimate dynamic spatial panel models of business creation in the high-tech and manufacturing industries. We consider regions of different sizes and systematically search for the most suitable ...
Caseworkers are the primary human resource used by governments to match unemployed workers to jobs. This paper provides first estimates on the role of caseworkers in reducing the duration of unemployment spells, using register data from the Swiss UI. For identification, I exploit caseworker-time specific variation in unexpected work absences, which I show to be independent of job seeker...
Germany’s research and development concentrated in urban areas – public research undergoing dynamic development According to a new study conducted by the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), spatial proximity to industrial production plays a greater role for Germany’s private research and development (R&D) than does proximity to publicly funded research institutions ...
How large is Germany’s research and development (R&D) workforce, and which regions have the highest concentration of R&D activity? In 2013, the German R&D workforce amounted to 589,000 people. We find a strong concentration in the two regions (so-called Raumordnungsregionen) of Stuttgart and Munich, with 19 percent of the workforce based there. Germany’s most densely ...
The bulk of Germany’s research and development (R&D) activity is concentrated in densely populated areas, urban regions that account for 62 percent of the country’s R&D workforce. The regions surrounding Stuttgart, Munich, and Braunschweig have by far the highest R&D intensity—that is, the share of R&D personnel in the total number of employees. Between 2003 and 2013, Munich lost some of its lead over ...
