The German economy exhibits rising service and declining manufacturing employment. But this decline is much sharper in import-competing than in export-oriented branches. We first document the individual-level job transitions behind those trends. They are not driven by manufacturing workers who...

We analyze the first data set on consistently defined functional urban areas in Europe and compare the European to the US urban system. City sizes in Europe do not follow a power law: the largest cities are "too small" to follow Zipf's law.

We analyze the first data set on consistently defined functional urban areas in Europe and compare the European to the US urban system. City sizes in Europe do not follow a power law: the largest cities are “too small” to follow Zipf’s law.

We address the effects of wages on employment growth on the basis of a theoretical model from which cost and demand effects can be derived. In the empirical analysis we take a highly disaggregated perspective and apply a newly developed shift-share regression technique on an exhaustive and very...

We address the effects of wages on employment growth on the basis of a theoretical model from which cost and demand effects can be derived. In the empirical analysis we take a highly disaggregated perspective and apply a newly developed shift-share regression technique on an exhaustive and very...

This paper analyses the impact of dynamic MAR- and Jacobs-externalities on local employment growth in Germany between 1993 and 2001. In order to facilitate a comparison between the neighbouring countries we firstly replicate the study of Combes (2000) on local employment growth in France and...

This paper analyses the impact of dynamic MAR- and Jacobs-externalities on local employment growth in Germany between 1993 and 2001. In order to facilitate a comparison between the neighbouring countries we firstly replicate the study of Combes (2000) on local employment growth in France and...

In this paper we study the dynamics of local employment growth in West Germany from 1980 to 2001. Using dynamic panel techniques, we analyse the timing of the impact of diversity and specialisation, as well as of the human capital structure of local industries. Diversity has a positive effect on...

In this paper I analyze the impact of human capital on local employment growth for the case of West Germany (1977-2002). I find robust evidence that skilled cities grow faster than unskilled ones, but this need not indicate localized human capital externalities are at work. A large initial share...

The salient rank-size rule known as Zipf's law is not only satisfied for Germany's national urban hierarchy, but also for the city size distributions in single German regions. To analyze this phenomenon, we build on the insights by Gabaix (1999) that Zipf's law follows from a stochastic growth...