Drifting together or falling apart? The empirics of regional economic growth in post-unification Germany

The objective of this article is to address the question of convergence across German districts in the first decade after German unification by drawing out and emphasizing some stylized facts of regional per capita income dynamics. We achieve this by employing nonparametric techniques which focus on the evolution of the entire cross-sectional income distribution. In particular, we follow a distributional approach to convergence based on kernel density estimation and implement a number of tests to establish the statistical significance of our findings. This article finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a trimodal/bimodal distribution.