Michaela Fuchs (p), Matthias Brachert

Justin Doran

This paper investigates the role of the local economic endowment for changes in employment and unemployment in the East German regions during the transition period directly following the dismantling of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1989. We hereby resort to the role of agglomeration economies, economic structure, trade exposure, geographic setting, and labor force composition. Using a regionally consistent and comprehensive data set on establishments and employees, we trace the impact of the economic endowment of GDR times on changes in overall and industry employment and in unemployment between September 1989 and 1993. First results highlight the role of all five groups of determinants, albeit with different implications for the outcome variables. As a tendency, urban regions with a high share of larger firms, of the construction sector and of entrepreneurs that are located farther away from West Germany tended to fare better. The composition of the local labor force plays a prominent role for unemployment, with a high share of women additionally driving up the unemployment rate. Overall, the results show that the legacy of Socialism has strongly shaped the East German regions’ capability to cope with the immense structural changes after 1989. The shock hit the regions with different intensity, which can be traced back to a certain set of initial endowments that helped to develop local resilience against these changes.

Justin Doran (p), Frank Crowley

Stephan Goetz

This paper analyses the resilience of Irish regions to the 2007 economic crisis. It analyses the role of structural change in determining how resistant Irish regions were to the crisis and also the ability of regions to recover following the crisis. The focus is on the role played by structural change in determining regions' resistance and recovery. Data is derived from the Irish censuses of 2006, 2011, and 2016 and is at electoral division level, of which there are approximately 3,400 in Ireland. Resilience indices are estimated and are used as dependent variables in cross sectional spatial econometric models which assess the impact of structural change over the period of crisis (2006-2011) and recovery (2012-2016). See extended abstract.

Stephan Goetz (p), Yicheol Han, Alexandra Tsvetkova, Zheng Tian, Timothy Slaper

Michaela Fuchs

see extended abstract