Die Arbeit untersucht, wie sich der demografische Wandel auf die öffentlichen Haushalte der deutschen Kommunen auswirkt. Zunächst werden die kommunalen Ausgaben und Einnahmen in sieben Altersgruppen der Bevölkerung aufgespaltet und unter Berücksichtigung verschiedener Ausgaben- und Einnahmekategorien auf ihre Alterssensitivität untersucht. Der verwendete Datensatz der 440 kreisfreien Städte und Landkreise unterscheidet sowohl nach Ausgaben- und Einnahmenseite der Budgets als auch nach Verwaltungs- und Vermögenshaushalten. Die ermittelten Altersstrukturprofile belegen die Jugendlastigkeit der Kommunalhaushalte. Danach werden die Befunde des Basisjahres 2005 in sechs verschiedenen Szenarien über einen Analysezeitraum von 20 Jahren projiziert, um die fiskalischen Effekte zu quantifizieren. Die rein demografischen Entwicklungen führen künftig zu Einnahmerückgängen, aber gleichzeitig zu größeren Potenzialen, um die Ausgaben zu senken. Verschiedene Trends und finanzpolitische Festlegungen reduzieren jedoch diese Effekte. Abschließend werden Anpassungsstrategien für die Kommunen diskutiert. / Demographic change will certainly have influence on the budgets of the German municipalities. Due to the division of public sector functions among different tiers in Germany’s federalism the municipalities serve mainly young generations with their public goods. Keeping this in mind, demographic trends will cause considerable effects on the communities’ budgets, especially in the Eastern part of Germany. Projecting the 440 German communes’ financial status of the basic year 2005 onto the year 2025, changing size and age structure of the German population will lower revenues as well as raise potentials to reduce expenditures even stronger. To take account of some special demographic trends and several fiscal regulations besides nothing but demographic ageing potential consolidation gains on the municipalities’ expenditures will be shrinking. Designing six different szenarios fiscal effects will be quantified. Finally, several strategies to deal with the fiscal consequences of demographic change will be discussed.

Die vorliegende Ausgabe konzentriert sich auf die Auswahl einer sinnvollen Analysemethode auf Basis des Realoptionsansatzes zur Analyse der Auswirkungen des demografischen Wandels auf die Siedlungsentwässerung. In der Literatur finden unterschiedliche Bewertungstechniken und verschiedene Bewertungsansätze der Realoptionstheorie Anwendung. Die in dieser Arbeit entwickelte Analysemethode kombiniert den qualitativen und den quantitativen Bewertungsansatz miteinander und plädiert für die Bewertungstechnik des Binomialmodells. Es wird eine Methode in fünf Arbeitsschritten vorgestellt, in der Kriterienüberprüfungen hinsichtlich des Vorhandenseins von Unsicherheit und Flexibilität vorgesehen sind. Zur empirischen Anwendung der Analysemethode bietet sich als Untersuchungsgebiet die Abwasserinfrastruktur des Plattenbaugebietes Weißwasser-Süd an, da dort vielfältige Probleme infolge des demografischen Wandels auftreten. Die Analyse zeigt, dass die Kriterien zur Anwendung der entwickelten Methode, Unsicherheit und Flexibilität, hinsichtlich mehrerer Einflussfaktoren und Anpassungsmaßnahmen erfüllt sind und somit die Anwendung des Realoptionsansatzes gerechtfertigt ist. Die Anwendung der Analysemethode auf das Untersuchungsgebiet in Weißwasser offenbart für das Versorgungsunternehmen vielfältige Handlungsmöglichkeiten zum Umgang mit bestehenden Problemen und zur Anpassung an beeinflussende unsichere Faktoren. Weiterhin können mit Hilfe der Analyse die Vor- und Nachteile der ausgewählten Methode aufgezeigt werden, was für weitere Untersuchungen des Themengebietes hilfreich sein kann.

In this dissertation, I examine three major aspects of Germany's education system from an empirical public finance perspective. First, I analyse the effects of strong demographic shifts by considering how the East German Länder responded to the rather dramatic decline in the number of students in primary schools (1993-2002). The demographic shock is a consequence of collapsing birth rates after German Reunification. Previous results from the literature, which rely on data from rather stable demographic periods, suggest that public resources are incompletely adjusted to shrinking cohort size such that large reductions in the student population translate into important increases in spending per student and not in significant reductions of public resources allocated to education. Evidence from a panel of 5 East German Länder over the 1993-2006 period suggests, however, that resource adjustments have been considerable, especially in the years when student cohorts were actually decreasing. Adjustments have been less tight in the period when student numbers stagnated such that the 50% decrease in cohort size has translated into a 25% increase in the teacher/student-ratio. Second, I test whether partisan theory can help to explain the practise of ability-tracking in West Germany. The analysis starts from the empirical observation that in the German education system – where tracking is practised very early compared to other OECD countries – the correlation of parent’s education or income with their children’s track choices is very strong. Thus, students whose parents have a high-education background have significantly higher probabilities of attending a high-ability track. Partisan theory states that political parties when in office pursue the interests of their members and electoral constituencies. Political parties representing highly educated households should therefore support the practise of ability-tracking and advocate higher education spending on the tracks for good students. Evidence from a panel of 10 West German Länder over the 1979-2006 period suggests that German political parties support tracking if they represent high-education households and oppose tracking if they represent lower educated households. The results also suggest that political parties tend to allocate public resources towards the track in which party members’ or party electorate’s offspring is overrepresented. Third, research-oriented higher education in Germany is almost exclusively provided by the public sector, which highlights the importance of measuring university cost efficiency, because market exit and entry – which ensure efficient resource use in the private sector – virtually do not exist (see e.g., Hanushek, 2002). Based on a panel of 70 German public universities over the 1998-2003 period I provide evidence about the factors that benefit efficient resource use in the German higher education landscape. I analyse whether relatively liberal university regulation improves the cost efficiency of public universities as suggested in the literature (see Aghion et al., 2008). The results show that liberal university regulation indeed contributes to more efficient use of resources. Moreover, I find that a prosperous private economic environment seems to reduce university costs.

The main contribution of this thesis is a comprehensive analysis of the influence of changes in the population structure on local communities, in particular with respect to the provision of publicly provided goods. The focus is placed on the consequences of two of the major processes of demographic change, namely aging and shrinking. The three main chapters of this contribution consider the effects at the local level from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. The first model focuses on the influence of population aging on the provision of local publicly provided goods, when the young population may relocate. When aging advances, gerontocracies and social planners substitute publicly provided goods aimed at the mobile young for publicly provided goods for the elderly. However, due to fiscal competition, gerontocracies will provide even more of the publicly provided good for the young than the social planner. The second model considers in a two-period setting, the interaction of a shrinking population when the investments made by the previous generation are long lived. The laissez-faire and welfare maximizing outcomes are computed for two cases; first with no costs of upkeep and second for the case when costs of upkeep accrue. A comparison of the solutions shows that public provision for the first generation is inefficiently low in laissez-faire when there are no costs of upkeep. However, if costs of upkeep accrue, the laissez-faire outcome for the intergenerational publicly provided good may be too high. Chapter four contains an empirical analysis. In a two-stage analysis the efficiency of the provision of child care services in municipalities is evaluated in the German State of Saxony. First, the results of the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) show substantial efficiency differences; the median municipality is up to 28% inefficient. In a second stage bootstrapped truncated regression, determinants of the inefficiency are identified. Explanatory variables such as an uncompensated mayor or a larger share of over 65-year-olds significantly increase inefficiency.