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Part of Journal Special Issue Involuntary Migration, Inequality, and Integration
The understanding of inequality requires the analysis of changes in income distributions across countries and over time as well as the identification of its drivers. To achieve this we use different statistical tools to identify the distributional patterns and summarize the results using...
Hiếu (pseudonym) embodies the ‘good refugee’ story. In 1979, he fled Vietnam by boat and eventually resettled in the Federal Republic of (West) Germany, as did many others. He quickly learned German and adapted to his new life with the help of a sponsor family. Hiếu completed his PhD...
Until the 1970s, only 1000 Vietnamese lived in West and East Germany, most of them international students. West Germany, in particular, had not yet been confronted with non-European refugees. This changed after 1978 with the influx of around 35,000 “boat people” from Viet Nam and...
The European Union (EU) has set targets for gradually reducing greenhouse gas emissions through 2050. One of the instruments involved is the 2009 Renewable Energy Directive, which specifies a 20 per cent renewable energy target for the EU by 2020. This paper reviews tensions and institutional...
This paper frames the transition towards clean energies as a sequential process of instrument choice and instrument change. First, regulators decide how to initiate the transition away from fossil energies. Here, support policies for renewable electricity are politically convenient because they...
From the book: The Role of Elites in Economic Development
Particular sets of institutions, once they become established in a society, have a strong tendency to persist. In this paper I argue that understanding how elites form and reproduce is key to understanding the persistence of institutions over time. I illustrate this idea with a simple political...
The former German Democratic Republic underwent a unique post-communist transition because it was absorbed into the wealthy Federal Republic of Germany and has received massive subsidies. Nonetheless, serious difficulties have persisted, including higher unemployment, rapid deindustrialization, and...
Charles S. Maier When the Berlin Wall fell, twenty years ago, on 9 November 1989, many expected that the East German (German Democratic Republic - DDR) transition would be amongst the easier transitions. Unification with one of the most powerful West European economies provided it with a...
From the book: Personal Wealth from a Global Perspective
The aim of this paper is to examine the concentration of wealth among the group of top wealth holders, defined as those with wealth in excess of a high cut off. The paper begins by considering the definition of this cut off, analogous to the definition of a poverty line at the other end of the...