Topic Regional Economy

Mapping the Economy: 100 Years of DIW Berlin ; 1925-2025

A Retrospective Study of State Aid Control in the German Broadband Market

We provide an evaluation of the impact of German public subsidy schemes in municipalities of Bavaria and Lower Saxony aimed at supporting the deployment of basic broadband infrastructure in rural Germany. Such subsidies are subject to state aid control by the European Commission and may only be granted if the potential market failure is addressed without distorting competition. We first analyse the ...

Broken Ties: Impact of Venezuela’s Suspension from Mercosur on Trade Networks

This paper examines the impact of sanctions on the structure of regional supply chains, focusing on Venezuela's suspension from the Mercosur trade bloc in 2016. To analyze this, we exploit a uniquely comprehensive database encompassing firm-to-firm transactions across several Latin American economies from 2014 to 2019. Our findings reveal how buyer-supplier linkages adapted to the shock along...

Born in the Land of Milk and Honey: Hometown Growth and Individual Wealth Accumulation

How does economic growth affect the distribution of wealth? Combining wealth records from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and local GDP growth across 401 German counties, this paper documents a sizable Hometown-Growth-Wealth Nexus. Using a standard OLG model to guide our estimation strategy, we nd that, because of hometown growth, a person born in flourishing Munich will have accumulated two to three ...

Urban Inequalities and Diversities in Germany

Germany has emerged over centuries as a central European country marked by political shifts that have resulted in deep regional fragmentation. The polit ical burdens of two world wars led, in the late 1940s, to a separation of the country into the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), a separation that ended with German (re)unification in ...

Change in Body Weight of Older Adults before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Results from the Berlin Aging Study II

ObjectivesChange in body weight during the COVID-19 pandemic as an unintended side effect of lockdown measures has been predominantly reported for younger and middle-aged adults. However, information on older adults for which weight loss is known to result in adverse outcomes, is scarce. In this study we describe the body weight change in older adults before, during, and after the COVID-19 lockdown ...

The Role of Regulation and Regional Government Quality for High Growth Firms: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

High-growth firms (HGFs) are important for job creation and productivity growth. We investigate the relationship between product and labour market regulations, as well as the quality of regional governments that implement these regulations, and the development of HGFs across European regions. Using data from Eurostat, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), World Economic ...

Airbnb and Rental Markets: Evidence from Berlin

Working Memory and Fluid Intelligence Are Differentially Related to Categories of Urban Fabric in Older Adults: Results from the Berlin Aging Study

Urbanization is Globally increasing at a rapid rate but its consequences for mental health, including cognitivefunctioning, are not well understood. In particular, little is known about the effects of different morphologicalfeatures associated with urban development, such as variations in the densities of urban fabric (i.e., degrees ofground sealing). We investigated associations of episodic memory, ...

House Price Expectations

This study examines short-, medium-, and long-run price expectations in housing markets. At the heart of our analysis is the combination of data from a tailored in-person household survey, past sale offerings, satellite imagery on developable land, and an information treatment (RCT). As novel finding, we show that price expectations show no evidence for momentum-effects in the long run. We also do ...