Seminar schedule
Research Seminar in Economics, Silke Anger (Universität Bamberg)
Silke Anger Making Integration Work? Facilitating Access to Occupational Recognition and Immigrants' Labor Market Performance This paper exploits a reform that facilitated the recognition of foreign occupational qualifications for non-EU immigrants in Germany. Using detailed administrative social security and survey data in a difference-in-differences design, we find that the reform increased the share of non-EU immigrants with occupational recognition by 5 percentage points, raising their employment in regulated occupations (e.g., nurses) by 18.6 percentafter the reform. Moreover, despite the large inflow of non-EU immigrants in regulated occupations, we find no evidence that these immigrants had lower skills or that they received lower wages.
Research Seminar in Economics, Katja Kaufmann
Katja Kaufmann Spillover Effects of Old-Age Pension Across Generations: Family Labor Supply and Child Outcomes We study the impact of grandparental retirement decisions on family members’ labor supply and child outcomes by exploiting a Dutch pension reform in a fuzzy Regression Discontinuity design. A one-hour increase in grandmothers’ hours worked causes adult daughters with young children to work half an hour less. Daughters without children, with older children and sons/daughters-in-law are not affected. We show important long-run impacts on maternal labor supply and on the child penalty. Test score effects are positive for children aged 4-7 (substitution from grandparental to maternal care), and negative for children aged 11-12 (substitution from grandparental to formal childcare).
Research Seminar in Economics, Christian Keuschnigg
Christian Keuschnigg Resource Dependence and Recycling Recycling waste from used goods can substitute for scarce raw materials and reduce resource dependence. This paper presents a model of waste collection, recycling and final goods production using raw and recycled materials. Recycling acts like a multiplier of primary resources. When there are incomplete trash markets, recycling is inefficiently low. An optimal tax on trash combined with a demand subsidy can induce the Pareto optimal allocation. The tax subsidy scheme is self-financing and mimics a competitive market for trash. We study trade between a resource poor country exporting final goods and a resource rich country exporting raw materials. Expanding the recycling industry can reduce resource dependency of the industrialized country. We find rich welfare effects of trade policy with non-trivial interactions of terms of trade effects and distortions in recycling.
Research Seminar in Economics, Melanie Krause
Melanie Krause Headwind or Tailwind at the Ballot Box? The Local Effect of Wind Turbines on Green Party Support Whether pro-climate parties win or lose at the ballot box in an area where wind turbines were built is a matter of debate. Some of the sparse literature on this relationship finds negative effects often interpreted as NIMBY behavior and concerns about noise and the visual intrusion of the landscape. Other studies highlight the economic benefits and habituation effects. We contribute by exploiting new fine-grained data on the position of wind turbines in Germany and more robust econometric methods. Crucially, we measure the visibility of wind turbines from settlements. We estimate the change in voting behavior within the last seven national election periods for the German Green Party in municipalities after the first visible wind turbine was constructed. During most periods, there is no statistically significant effect of visible wind turbines on Green party vote share, suggesting that voters do not punish the party. Yet, this seems to be changing in the 2021 election period because of various political and energy-related reasons.
Research Seminar in Economics, Guido Neidhöfer
Guido Neidhöfer Topic: To be announced
Research Seminar in Economics, Christoph Trebesch
Christoph Trebesch Populist Leaders and the Economy Populism at the country level is at an all-time high, with more than 25% of nations currently governed by populists. How do economies perform under populist leaders? We build a new cross-country database identifying 50 populist presidents and prime ministers 1900-2018. We find that the economic cost of populism is high. After 15 years, GDP per capita is more than 10% lower compared to a plausible non-populist counterfactual. Rising economic nationalism and protectionism, unsustainable macroeconomic policies, and institutional decay under populist rule do lasting damage to the economy.
Research Seminar in Economics, Guntram Wolff
Guntram Wolff Green Investments, Decarbonisation and Public Finance
Research Seminar in Economics, Holger Gerhardt
Holger Gerhardt Topic: To be announced.
Research Seminar in Economics, Kirstin Hubrich
Kirstin Hubrich The transmission of financial shocks and the leverage of financial institutions: An endogenous regime switching framework We conduct a novel empirical analysis of the role of leverage of financial institutions for the transmission of financial shocks to the macroeconomy. For that purpose we develop an endogenous regime-switching structural vector autoregressive model with time-varying transition probabilities that depend on the state of the economy. We propose new identification techniques for regime switching models. Recently developed theoretical models emphasize the role of bank balance sheets for the build-up of financial instabilities and the amplification of financial shocks. We build a market-based measure of leverage of financial institutions employing institution-level data and find empirical evidence that real effects of financial shocks are amplified by the leverage of financial institutions in the financial-constraint regime. We also find evidence of heterogeneity in how financial institutions, including depository financial institutions, global systemically important banks and selected nonbank financial institutions, affect the transmission of shocks to the macroeconomy. Our results confirm the leverage ratio as a useful indicator from a policy perspective.
Research Seminar in Economics, Silke Übelmesser
Silke Übelmesser Pension Reform Preferences in Germany: Does Information Matter? Demographic change has an impact on pay-as-you-go pension systems. To maintain their financial sustainability, reforms are necessary, but often lack public support. Based on representative survey data from Germany, we conduct a survey experiment which allows investigating whether salience of or information about demographic change enhances preferences towards reforms in general as well as towards specific reform measures. We find that salience and information provision significantly increase the perceived reform necessity. Furthermore, salience increases preferences for an increase of the retirement age over other reform measures, while information provision reduces preferences for tax subsidies. In addition, we highlight the impact of prior beliefs and find that overestimation of demographic change in the short term reduces the treatment effects, while overestimation in the long term increases it. As the salience and the information treatments barely differ, we conclude that it is not the information about the demographic change, but rather being made aware of the challenges of the pension system, which matters for reform preferences.
Research Seminar in Economics, Manuel Santos de Silva
Manuel Santos Silva Right-wing populism in the tropics: Economic crisis, the political gender gap, and the election of Bolsonaro This paper investigates whether differential exposure to a labor market shock by gender contributed to the rise of far-right populism in Brazil. Using a shift-share approach, we find that gender heterogeneity in shock exposure predicts electoral outcomes. Male-specific labor demand shocks increase support for Bolsonaro in the 2018 Brazilian presidential election, but female-specific shocks have the reverse effect. Additional results suggest that these opposing effects are accompanied by an unprecedented shift in social values of men and women, with men becoming relatively more conservative. Our preferred interpretation is that Bolsonaro's conservative rhetoric---shared by several other right-wing politicians---is more appealing to men once they experience a relative loss in economic status, which is consistent both with the positive male effect as well as the negative female effect.
Research Seminar in Economics, Axel Ockenfels
Axel Ockenfels Behavioral Market Design Human behavior shapes almost all aspects of our lives. It influences the success of societies, markets, organizations, and individuals. Indeed, many economic and social challenges, such as pandemics, climate change, traffic congestion and energy scarcity, require behavioral change. In this talk, I use case studies to show how research in market design and behavioral economics can be used to develop mechanisms that align incentives and behavior with the underlying goals.
Research Seminar in Economics, Christian Basteck
Christian Basteck Strategy-Proof and Envy-Free Random Assignments We study the random assignment of indivisible objects among a set of agents with strict preferences. We show that there exists no mechanism which is unanimous, strategy-proof and envy-free. Weakening the first requirement to q-unanimity – i.e., when every agent ranks a different object at the top, then each agent shall receive his most-preferred object with probability of at least q – we show that a mechanism satisfying strategy-proofness, envy-freeness and ex-post weak non-wastefulness can be q-unanimous only for q ≤ 2/n (where n is the number of agents). To demonstrate that this bound is tight, we introduce a new mechanism, Random-Dictatorship-cum-Equal-Division (RDcED), and show that it achieves this maximal bound when all objects are acceptable. In addition, for three agents, RDcED is characterized by the first three properties and ex-post weak efficiency. If objects may be unacceptable, strategy-proofness and envy-freeness are jointly incompatible even with ex-post weak non-wastefulness.
Research Seminar in Economics, Christoph Grosse-Steffen
Christoph Grosse Steffen Anchoring of Inflation Expectations: Do Inflation Target Formulations Matter? Inflation target formulations differ across countries and over time. Most widespread are point targets, target ranges, hybrid combinations of the two, or mere definitions of price stability. This paper proposes a novel empirical measure of expectations anchoring based on the cross-sectional distribution of private sector inflation point forecasts. Applying this to a panel of 29 countries, it finds three main results. First, a numerical target definition per se does not improve anchoring compared to a definition of price stability, while the formulation of a numerical reference point increases the degree of anchoring. Second, point targets and hybrid target formulations are associated with better anchoring than target ranges. Third, periods of persistent target deviations lead to an increase in tail risks to the inflation outlook. Conditional on such periods, point targets and hybrid targets attenuate tail risks to the inflation outlook, with a stronger quantitative effect for point targets. The results are consistent with models suggesting that targets ranges are interpreted as zones where monetary policy is less active
Research Seminar in Economics, Ben Greiner
Ben Greiner Social and economic preferences towards the end of life For various strategic, psychological, and cognitive reasons, social and economic behavior may change as people approach high age and the end of life. Using large-scale in-person and online surveys with embedded experiments, we study how individual and social decision-making varies with age and subjective life expectancy. I'll present preliminary results on trust and trustworthiness, altruistic giving, risk preferences, and in particular time preferences.
Research Seminar in Economics, Jan Marcus
Abstract: We use school entry cut-off rules to study the effects of schooling on mortality in Germany. Based on the 1970 Census and the full Cause-of-Death Statistics for Germany, we exploit information on the exact date of birth within a regression discontinuity framework. Individuals born just after the school entry cut-off are older when they enter school, and they are three percentage points more likely to earn a higher secondary school leaving certificate. In later life, those individuals born after the school entry cut-off are significantly less likely to die before age 70. Studying the causes of death, we find that the reduced mortality risk is mainly driven by fewer deaths associated with unhealthy behaviours over the life course. Jan Marcus is an Assistant Professor for Econometrics at University Hamburg. His research focuses on causal analysis, economics of education, health economics, and policy evaluation.
Research Seminar in Economics, Paul Frijters
Wellbeing and Religious Behaviour During and After Natural Disasters Abstract: As the severity and frequency of natural disasters become more pronounced with climate change and the increased habitation of at-risk areas, it is important to understand how people react to them. This presentation combines two papers on that general topic. We look at natural disasters in the US in a sample of 2.2 million observations, allowing for individual- and county-level factors. The event-study design contrasts changes in outcomes in counties affected by disasters with that of residents in unaffected counties of the same state. In the first paper we look at psychological resilience during and after disasters, measured by changes in hedonic wellbeing. We find that people’s hedonic wellbeing is reduced by approximately 6% of a standard deviation in the first two weeks following the event, with the effect diminishing rapidly thereafter. The negative effects are driven by White, older, and economically advantaged sub-populations, who exhibit less resilience. We find no evidence that existing indices of community resilience moderate impacts. In the second paper we look at religious observances during natural disasters and afterwards. We find that individuals reduce the time spent on prayer during disasters and then rapidly return to baseline, with no indication of sustained changes.
Research Seminar in Economics, Martin Fochmann
Abstract: Tax perceptions are well-known to determine the economic behavior of individuals. While there is broad evidence on significant tax-related misperceptions, however, little is known on firms’ tax-related misperception. We quantify firms’ tax-related misperception using survey data of 657 German firms. Further, we identify drivers of firms’ tax-related misperception. Our results indicate that firms considerably misperceive their average tax rate (ATR) and marginal tax rate (MTR). Respondents from all kinds of firms such as sole proprietorships, partnerships, and corporations overestimate their ATR, however, corporations to a significantly lower extent. By contrast, our findings on MTRs are inconclusive. Surprisingly, comparing firms’ perception of ATRs with MTRs reveals a missing understanding of basic tax concepts. According to our results, size, legal form, and estimates of tax complexity and tax compliance cost are the main drivers of tax burden misperception.
Research Seminar in Economics, Maja Adena
Abstract: Has the COVID-19 pandemic affected pro-sociality among individuals? After the onset of the pandemic, many charitable appeals were updated to include a reference to COVID-19. Did donors increase their giving in response to such changes? In order to answer these questions, we conducted a real-donation online experiment with more than 4,200 participants from 149 local areas in England and over 21 weeks. First, we varied the fundraising appeal to either include or exclude a reference to COVID-19. We found that including the reference to COVID-19 in the appeal increased donations. Second, in a natural experiment like approach, we studied how the relative local severity of the pandemic and media coverage about local COVID-19 severity affected giving in our experiment. We found that both higher local severity and more related articles increased giving of participants in the respective areas. This holds for different specifications, including specifications with location fixed effects, time fixed effects, a broad set of individual characteristics to account for a potentially changing composition of the sample over time and to account for health- and work-related experiences with and expectations regarding the pandemic. While negative experiences with COVID-19 correlate negatively with giving, both approaches led us to conclude that the pure effect of in creased salience of the pandemic on pro-sociality is positive
Research Seminar in Economics, Tabea Bucher-Koenen
Abstract: Women are less financially literate than men. It is unclear whether this gap reflects a lack of knowledge or, rather, a lack of confidence. Our survey experiment shows that women tend to disproportionately respond “do not know” to questions measuring financial knowledge, but when this response option is unavailable, they often choose the correct answer. We estimate a latent class model and predict the probability that respondents truly know the correct answers. We find that about one-third of the financial literacy gender gap can be explained by women’s lower confidence levels. Both financial knowledge and confidence explain stock market participation.
Research Seminar in Economics, Christian Lehmann
Abstract: Residents of civil war countries must decide whether to stay or flee, often without reliable information about costs and benefits of fleeing. Using original survey data on Syrian refugees, I present evidence that residents solve this information problem by imitating the emigration decision of other residents. However, if everybody imitates others and nobody knows the true costs and benefits of fleeing, then there is a substantial chance that many make the wrong decision. The right decision, for example, is to flee when staying means death. Empirically, however, I find no relationship between survey respondents’ propensity to flee and objective measures of death risk in their origin location in Syria, which perhaps indicates that people make wrong emigration decisions. My findings suggest a new form of humanitarian aid in conflict zones: the distribution of information.
Research Seminar in Economics, Helmut Rainer
Abstract: Domestic violence is ubiquitous, with millions of women worldwide being repeatedly victimized by their intimate partners. So how should police officers respond to domestic violence incidents in order to maximize the likelihood that battered women will not be victimized again? We develop and apply a novel instrumental variable strategy to explore how arresting batterers is linked to repeat domestic violence. Drawing upon unique and extremely detailed administrative data on hundreds of thousands domestic violence incidents recorded by a major police force in Great Britain, we exploit (i) that the availability and geographical location of patrol officers to assign to respond to an domestic violence incident is "as good as random", and (ii) that patrol officers differ systematically in their propensity to arrest suspected batters. We find that arrest can break cycles of domestic violence, decreasing the probability that victims are revictimized within 12 months by 31 percentage points. Exploiting domestic violence calls initiated by third parties rather than victims, we provide evidence indicating that reductions in domestic violence reporting do not drive the arrest effect. To explain why arrest deters repeat domestic violence, we demonstrate that it paths the way to immediate criminal sanctions against suspected batterers: it increases the likelihood a suspect batterer faces a criminal investigation, is retained in custody during the investigation, and is charged with a crime. In stark contrast to recent calls for a decriminalization of domestic violence, our results suggest that the optimal police response to domestic violence involves a low threshold of tolerance towards batterers.
Research Seminar in Economics, Matthias Neuenkirch
Abstract: The empirical literature of stock market predictability mainly suffers from model uncertainty and parameter instability. To meet this challenge, we propose a novel approach that combines dimensionality reduction, regime-switching models, and forecast combination to predict the S&P 500. First, we aggregate the weekly information of 146 popular macroeconomic and financial variables using different principal component analysis techniques. Second, we estimate one-step Markov-switching models with time-varying transition probabilities using the principal components as predictors. Third, we pool the models in forecast clusters to hedge against model risk and to evaluate the usefulness of different specifications. Our weekly forecasts respond to regime changes in a timely manner to participate in recoveries or to prevent losses. This is also reflected in an improvement of risk-adjusted performance measures as compared to several benchmarks. However, when considering stock market returns, our forecasts do not outperform common benchmarks. Nevertheless, these add statistical and, in particular, economic value during recessions or in declining markets.
Research Seminar in Economics, Bernhard Kassner
Abstract: We study the relationship between overconfidence and the political and financial behavior of a nationally representative sample. To do so, we introduce a new method of eliciting overconfidence that is simple to understand, quick to implement, and captures respondents' excess confidence in their own judgment. Our results show that, in line with theoretical predictions, an excessive degree of confidence in one's judgment is correlated with lower portfolio diversification, larger stock price forecasting errors, and more extreme political views. Additionally, we find that overconfidence is correlated with voting absenteeism. These results appear to validate our method and show how overconfidence is a bias that permeates several aspects of peoples' life.
Research Seminar in Economics, Mathias Huebener
Abstract: Motherhood and parental leave interrupt employment relationships, likely imposing costs on firms. We document that mothers who are difficult to replace internally take shorter leave and that their firms hire replacements more often. Introducing more generous parental leave benefits erases the link between mothers’ internal replaceability and their leave duration. In firms with few internal substitutes this reduces employment in the short-, but not longer-term. Firms respond by hiring fewer women of childbearing age into occupations where they are difficult to replace internally. Taken together, motherhood and generous parental leave policies burden firms that have few internal substitutes available.
Research Seminar in Economics, Steffen Ahrens
Asset Price Dynamics and Endogenous Trader Overconfidence Abstract: Overconfidence is one of the most important biases in financial decision making and commonly associated with excessive trading and asset price volatility. So far, most of the finance literature takes overconfidence as a given, “static” personality trait. Using a new experimental design, we show that trader overconfidence is endogenous and co-moves with asset prices; when asset prices go up, overconfidence rises, and when asset prices go down, overconfidence falls. Larger fluctuations in asset prices are met by larger changes in overconfidence. Hence, our results point towards a feedback loop in which overconfidence adds fuel to the flame of existing bubbles.
Ort: Online Presentation
Research Seminar in Economics, Josef Brüderl: "The Age Trajectory of Happiness: How Lack of Causal Reasoning has Produced the Myth of a U-Shaped Age-Happiness Trajectory"
Abstract: A large interdisciplinary literature on the relationship between age and subjective well-being (happiness) has produced very mixed evidence. Virtually every conceivable age-happiness trajectory has been supported by empirical evidence and theoretical arguments. Sceptics may conclude that the social science of happiness can only produce arbitrary results. In this paper we argue that this conclusion is premature. Instead, the methodological toolbox that has been developed by the modern literature on causal inference gives scholars everything they need to arrive at valid conclusions: the causal inference toolbox only must be applied by happiness researchers. We identify four potential sources of bias that may distort the assessment of the age-happiness relationship. By causal reasoning we derive a model specification that avoids these biases. For an empirical illustration, we use the longest running panel study with information on happiness, the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984-2017; N persons=70,922; N person-years =565,703). With these data we demonstrate the relevance of the four biases and how combinations of different biases can reproduce almost any finding from the literature. Most biases tend to produce a spuriously U-shaped age trajectory, the most prominent finding from the literature. In contrast, with our specification we find a (nearly monotonic) declining age-happiness trajectory.
Ort: Online Presentation
Research Seminar in Economics, Evi Pappa: "What are the likely macroeconomic effects of the EU Recovery plan"
Abstract: We examine the dynamic macroeconomic effects of the two largest EU regional structural funds. On average, ERDF funds have significant positive short term consequences on regional macroeconomic variables and gains dissipate almost entirely within three years. ESF funds have negative impact effects on regional variables, but their average cumulative medium term multipliers are positive and economically significant. We detect important regional asymmetries which may induce differential transition paths and outlooks for economic transformation. Location, level of development, EU tenure, Euro area membership and national borders account for part of the asymmetries. We present a two-region equilibrium model with sticky prices and endogenous growth through investment in R&D and human capital that reproduces the facts and explains some of the observed asymmetries. The policy implications for the newly created Recovery fund are discussed.
Ort: Online Presentation
Research Seminar in Economics, Libertad González
Abstract: We consider a non-cooperative model in which the husband and wife decide on parental leave and the allocation of time between child rearing and the labor market. They can choose the non-cooperative outside option or cooperate by reaching an agreement of specialization, in which the wife specializes in raising kids while the husband works and transfers consumption to his wife. The model shows that "egalitarian" couples (with a sufficiently small gender wage gap) do not specialize and play the outside option, while "traditional" (with a medium gender wage gap) and "very traditional" (with a sufficiently high gender wage gap) couples do have such an agreement. A expansion in paternity leave reduces the net benefits from the agreement and moves traditional couples to their outside option, where women work more and men do more childcare. As a result, the cost of raising children increases , and fertility declines. Assuming a loss of utility from children in the case of divorce, lower fertility increases the probability of divorce. Using Spanish data and RDD analysis, we confirm our model’s predictions. Specifically, we find that, among traditional couples, the two-week paternity leave introduced in 2007 resulted in a reduction in fertility by up to 15%, an increase in the probability to divorce by 37%, an increase female employment by up to 7 percentage points, and an increase in father’s childcare time by as much as an hour per day.
Ort: Online Presentation
Research Seminar in Economics, Jan Pablo Burgard
Abstract: Spatial dynamic microsimulations allow for the multivariate analysis of complex sys-tems with geographic segmentation. A synthetic replica of the system is stochastically projected into future periods using micro-level transition probabilities. These should accurately represent the dynamics of the system to allow for reliable simulation outcomes. In practice, transition probabilities are unknown and must be estimated from suitable survey data. This can be challenging when the dynamics vary locally. Survey data often lacks in regional detail due to confidentiality restrictions and limited sampling resources. In that case, transition probability estimates may misrepresent regional dynamics due to insufficient local observations and coverage problems. The simulation process subsequently fails to provide an authentic evolution of the system. A constrained maximum likelihood approach for probability alignment to solve these issues is proposed. It accounts for regional heterogeneity in transition dynamics through the consideration of external benchmarks from administrative records. It is proven that the method is consistent. A parametric bootstrap for uncertainty estimation is presented. Simulation experiments are conducted to compare the approach with an existing method for probability alignment. Furthermore, an empirical application to labor force estimation based on the German Microcensus is provided.
Ort: Online Presentation
Research Seminar in Economics, Rory McGee: "Old Age Savings and House Price Shocks"
Abstract: Elderly households hold most of their wealth in housing, maintain high levels of wealth throughout their retirement, and often leave bequests. The value of their houses are subject to potentially large shocks that can affect their financial circumstances in retirement. To what extent do these shocks affect their savings, consumption, and bequests? Answering this question requires separating precautionary savings, bequest motives, and the desire to remain in one's home. I develop and estimate a structural model of retirement savings decisions with realistic risks, housing, and heterogeneity in bequest preferences. I exploit exogenous policy changes to the taxation of housing and bequests, subjective bequest probabilities and rich longitudinal data on wealth composition to separately identify the different motives for holding wealth and spending in retirement. Estimated bequest motives differ across the households and roughly half of the sample has no bequest motive. House price changes are quantitatively important and a large fraction of increases are passed on to future generations. I use the estimated model to evaluate the current structure of disregard eligibility for (Medicaid-like) programs that insure retirees. I find that for every pound it costs the government, increasing the disregards for liquid assets provides more insurance value than increasing the disregards for houses.
Ort: Online Presentation
Research Seminar in Economics, Bernd Fitzenberger: "The role of unemployment and job change when estimating the returns to migration"
Abstract: Estimating the returns to migration from East to West Germany, we focus on pre-migration employment dynamics, earnings uncertainty, and job change. Migrants are found to be negatively selected with respect to labor market outcomes, with a large drop in earnings and employment during the last few months before migration. We find sizeable positive earnings and employment gains of migration both in comparison to staying or job change. The gains vary considerably with pre-migration earnings and with the counterfactual considered. Future migrants have worse expectations for their labor market prospects in the East and migrants show a greater openness to mobility.
Ort: Online Presentation
Research Seminar in Economics, Arnaud Chevalier: "Asian Gold: Expected Returns to Crime and Thieves Behaviour"
Abstract: Where are crimes committed? We explore how variations in the expected returns to crime affects the location of burglaries in the UK. Our identify- cation strategy relies on the common perception in the UK that families of South Asian descent store a substantial amount of gold jewellery. Move- ments on the international market for gold affect the expected gains from targeting these households, and consequently the location of burglaries. Us- ing a neighbourhood level panel on reported crime, we find that when the price of gold increases, neighbourhoods with a larger share of South Asian households face a disproportionate increase in property crime relative to other neighbourhoods in the same local authority. We conduct a battery of tests to eliminate alternative explanations.
Ort: Online Presentation
Research Seminar in Economics Klaus Zimmermann: "Social Assimilation and Labor Market Outcomes of Migrants in China"
Abstract: Previous research has found identity to be relevant for international migration, but has neglected internal mobility as in the case of the Great Chinese Migration. However, the context of the identities of migrants and their adaption in the migration process is likely to be quite different. The gap is closed by examining social assimilation and the effect on the labourmarket outcomes of migrants in China, the country with the largest record of internal mobility. Using instrumental variable estimation, the study finds that identifying as local residents significantly increase migrants’ hourly wages and reduce hours worked, although their monthly earnings remained barely changed. Further findings suggest that migrants with strong local identity are more likely to use local networks in job search, and to obtain jobs with higher average wages and lower average hours worked per day.
Ort: Online presentation
Research Seminar in Economics Malte Sandner: "Prenatal and Infancy Home Visiting in Germany: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial on Child and Maternal Outcomes at Child Age 7"
Abstract: This study exploits a randomized controlled trial to investigate the effects of a German home visiting program (Pro Kind) for disadvantaged families on child and maternal outcomes at child’s age 7. The intervention started during pregnancy and continued until the second birthday. We present results five years after the end of the home visits. We use data from telephone interviews, on-site interviews, and developmental tests to assess children’s and mothers’ mental health, life satisfaction, cognitive and social development, parenting behavior, signs of child abuse or neglect, and the family’s socio-economic status. Furthermore, we access administrative data to obtain information regarding the mother’s and child’s usage of health care services, and mother’s welfare usage and employment history. We find that Pro Kind has several positive effects on reported child behavior. For mothers, Pro Kind reduces violent parenting and increases mental health. Additionally, mothers in the treatment group have more second births and are less months employed than in the control group indicating that mother in the treatment group focus more on their family life. Overall, the results suggest that the Pro Kind intervention has long lasting effects and changed the life of the participating families sustainable in many domains.
Ort: Online presentation
Research Seminar in Economics Jochem de Bresser: "Preferences for income redistribution: a new survey instrument and experimental evidence"
Abstract : This paper proposes a new survey instrument to measure preferences for income redistribution. Starting from the status quo, respondents construct their preferred distribution of after-tax income by changing the tax rates of the bottom four income quintiles. Taxes for the top quintile update automatically to keep the size of the govern-ment budget fixed and incorporate realistic adjustment of taxable income (e.g. changes in labor supply or tax evasion). The new measure is quantitative, comparable across individuals and focuses on redistribution without simultaneous changes in social insur-ance or the size of the government. Moreover, it connects outcomes with the policy tools available to affect them and engages respondents by dynamically updating the income distribution both graphically and numerically. Data are collected in the LISS panel, a large scientific panel that is representative for the Dutch population. The results indicate that the status quo is optimal for about half of the sample and that the other half would prefer a more equal distribution. Only 5% opt for more inequality, but not beyond a flat-tax. Two information treatments inform respondents about the efficiency costs of redistribution, updated dynamically, and the most important income sources across income groups. The latter prompts respondents to stick to the status quo rather than increase equality, while efficiency costs lead to smaller deviations without changing their incidence.
Ort: Online presentation
Research Seminar in Economics Arthur Seibold: "Privatizing Disability Insurance"
Abstract : In light of rising expenditure, many social insurance programs face pressure to cut back their generosity to remain sustainable. Such reforms are often accompanied by the idea that individuals can obtain private insurance. In this project, we investigate how the private disability insurance (DI) market responds to a large change in public DI in Germany. Using a combination of administrative data on public DI claims and data from a large private insurance provider, we analyze the reform of 2001, which abolished a type of public DI for younger birth cohorts. We document that the private DI market multiplies in size after the reform. Results from a difference-in-difference strategy suggest a significant causal effect on private DI coverage among affected individuals. Yet, the estimated post-reform coverage rate remains modest. Moreover, we find that the share of privately insured individuals is lower among those with higher occupational disability risk and with lower income.
Ort: Online presentation
Research Seminar in Economics Phoebe Ishak: "The Effect of Natural Resource Income Shocks on Human Capital: Theory-Inspired Evidence"
Abstract: We explore the effects of persistent income shocks on human capital using oil price fluctuations in a large sample of relevant African countries and employing micro data from multiple waves of the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). Theoretically, such shocks enable human capital investment via the standard income effect; but also crowd it out because of substitutability between natural resource and human capital income sources – so the net outcome can go either way. Our model also suggests that the relative strength of the two effects depends on the age at which the shock is experienced and the affected gender. Consistent with these insights, we find that income shocks in early life enhance educational attainment and other derived outcomes; but reduce them if experienced in adolescence, especially for females. These results survive multiple robustness checks, and their broader implications are discussed.
Ort: Online presentation
Research Seminar in Economics Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich: "Was kann der Mietendeckel zur Entspannung des Berliner Wohnungsmarkts leisten?"
Ort: Online presentation
Research Seminar in Economics Tim Lohse: "Pecunia non olet - On the self-selection into (dis)honest earning opportunities"
We study self-selection into earning money in an honest or dishonest fashion based on individuals. attitudes toward truthful reporting. We propose a decision-theoretic framework where individuals willingness to pay for honest earnings is determined by their (behavioral) lying costs. Our laboratory experiment identifies lying costs as the decisive factor causing self-selection into honest earning opportunities for individuals with high costs and into cheating opportunities for those prepared to misreport. Our experimental setup allowsus to recover individual lying costs and their distribution in the population.
Ort: Online presentation
Research Seminar in Economics Regina Riphahn: "Long-run effects of wage subsidies on maternal labor market outcomes"
We use rich and precise administrative data to study the causal effect of subsidized employment on first time mothers' labor market outcomes up to 8 years after the birth. We apply propensity score matching combined with an event study design to determine the causal effects of taking up a subsidized Minijob after a first birth. We compare this employment choice to similar but unsubsidized, i.e., regular employment. Our results indicate that mothers who take up Minijob employment after a first birth are significantly less likely to be regularly employed and earn significantly lower wages even 8 years after the birth. The high rate of Minijob employment among first time mothers after the birth drives a substantial share of the child penalty of German mothers.
Ort: Online
Research Seminar in Economics Ulrich Rendtel: "Misst der Berliner Mietspiegel die ortsübliche Vergleichsmiete? Ein Vergleich mit dem Mikrozensus 2018"
Mit dem Wohnmodul des Mikrozensus 2018 ist es erstmals möglich, Wohnungsmieten lokal auf einen 100m x 100m Gitter zu analysieren. Dies eröffnet die Möglichkeit, die Wohnlagen des Berliner Mietspiegels im Mikrozensus abzubilden. Da auch weitere Bestimmungsgrößen des Mietspiegels zur Verfügung stehen, können Vergleiche mit dem Berliner Tabellenmietspiegel 2019 durchgeführt werden. Der Vortrag geht der Frage nach, ob die sehr hohen Nonresponse-Raten bei der Erhebung des Berliner Mietspiegels eventuell zu einer Verzerrung der Messung der ortsüblichen Vergleichsmiete geführt haben. Hier ist Mikrozensus mit Teilnahmepflicht eindeutig im Vorteil. Weiterhin wird ein alternativer Regressionsmietspiegel für Berlin präsentiert, der neben den Wohnlagen des Mietspiegels auch Postleitzahlgebiete berücksichtigt. Die Analyse berücksichtigt zwei Auswahlebenen: Einmal die Auswahl der neuen Mietverhältnisse der letzten vier Jahre sowie die Berücksichtigung aller Mietverhältnisse. Die Vergleichsmiete des Mietspiegels, die neben den Neuvermietungen auch Haushalte mit Mietanpassungen in den letzten 4 Jahren berücksichtigt, sollte zwischen diesen Mikrozensus-Werten liegen. Der Regressionsmietspiegel weist auf bedeutende regionale Unterschiede im Berliner Mietniveau hin. Weiterhin kann die Entwicklung der Mietspreise in Berlin und deren sich beschleunigender Anstieg eindrucksvoll dargestellt werden.
Ort: Online presentation (German)