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Most German states amended their local constitutions during the 1990s and now allow for the direct election of mayors, initiatives and referendums, and vote aggregation, as well as vote splitting. In this paper, it is asked whether these reforms had any effects on local fiscal policies. It is shown that the direct election of mayors led to lower government spending, whereas the introduction of direct democratic elements led to higher expenditures. The empirical results concerning direct democracy are substantially different from findings in relation to both Switzerland and the US. It is argued that this difference may be due to a lack of fiscal referendums in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Immigrants are much less likely to own their homes than natives, even after controlling for a broad range of life-cycle and socioeconomic characteristics and housing market conditions. This paper extends the analysis of immigrant housing tenure choice by explicitly accounting for ethnic identity as a potential influence on the homeowner-ship decision, using a two-dimensional composite index of ethnic identity that incorporates attachments to both origin and host cultures. In the case of Germany, the evidence suggests that immigrants with a stronger commitment to the host country are more likely to achieve homeownership for a given set of socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, regardless of their level of attachment to their home country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tertiarisation, or perhaps more accurately, the deindustrialisation of the economy has left deep scars on cities. It is evident not only in the industrial wastelands and empty factory buildings, but also in the income and social structures of cities. Industrialisation, collective wage setting, and the welfare state led to a stark reduction in income differences over the course of the 20th century. Conversely, deindustrialisation and the shift to tertiary sectors could result in increasing wage differentiation. Moreover, numerous studies on global cities, the dual city, and divided cities have also identified income polarisation as a central phenomenon in the development of major cities. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we find an increasing polarisation of household income structures since the mid-1990s. In urban agglomerations, this income polarisation is even more pronounced than in the more rural regions. The income polarisation in Germany is likely to have multiple causes, some of which are directly linked to policies such as the deregulation of the labour market. But extensive deindustrialisation is probably also one of the drivers of this process, and it has directly weakened Germany’s middle-income groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many researchers take as axiomatic the proposition that economic action in clusters is embedded in dense, durable and trust-based social networks. It is suggested here that the bias towards high-trust, enduring relations obscures the competitive dynamics of networks, even where co-operation can be identified. Drawing attention to the competitive motives underlying the construction of social networks, an investigation is made into the duration and brokering of dyadic relations in business owners’ advice networks. The analysis of 668 dyadic ties in a population of 113 small business owners in two textile and clothing clusters in Germany reveals considerable variation in the duration of social relations and the likelihood that they were formed through third-party brokers, many of whom were direct competitors creating more ephemeral links. The findings suggest that ‘marketless’ conceptions of social networks in clusters need to be balanced with a stronger concern for the role of competition in the social embeddedness of small firms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The rising focus of politicians as well as scientists in the EU on the large urban agglomerations as centres of economic growth is accompanied by political efforts to identify and to demarcate such agglomerations under the label ‘metropolitan regions’. This study develops a theoretical framework broaching the issue of cooperation between municipalities from the perspective of regional economics as well as political science. The framework is applied to the empirical case of the polycentric metropolitan region of the ‘Saxony triangle’ in east Germany. The results show that various intervening factors prevent intense co-operation between the actors in the region. Policy implications and conclusions for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]