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Monetary Policy, External Instruments, and Heteroskedasticity

We develop a structural vector autoregressive framework that combines external instruments and heteroskedasticity for identification of monetary policy shocks. We show that exploiting both types of information sharpens structural inference, allows testing the relevance and exogeneity condition for instruments separately using likelihood ratio tests, and facilitates the economic interpretation of the ...

A Tale of Two Data Sets: Comparing German Administrative and Survey Data Using Wage Inequality as an Example

The IAB’s Sample of Integrated Labour Market Biographies (SIAB) and the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) are the two data sets most commonly used to analyze wage inequality in Germany. While the SIAB is based on administrative reports by employers to the social security system, the SOEP is a survey data set in which respondents self-report their wages. Both data sources have their specific advantages and ...

Working Life and Human Capital Investment: Causal Evidence from a Pension Reform

Viral Shocks to the World Economy

We construct a global index of epidemic news based on text analysis of newspapers from 17 countries. We apply the index to study the economic consequences of epidemics on the world economy in structural vector autoregressions. Epidemic shocks exert significantly and persistently negative effects on output and prices that last for up to two years. There is no quick recovery and no overshooting. The ...

Associations of Socioeconomic Disparities with Buccal Dna-Methylation Measures of Biological Aging

Background: Individuals who are socioeconomically disadvantaged are at increased risk for aging-related diseases and perform less well on tests of cognitive function. The weathering hypothesis proposes that these disparities in physical and cognitive health arise from an acceleration of biological processes of aging. Theories of how life adversity is biologically embedded identify epigenetic alterations, ...

Earnings Trajectories After Divorce: The Legacies of the Earner Model During Marriage

Divorce marks the legal endpoint of a marital union. While divorce is increasingly seen as a ‘clean break’, the past marital history of the couple may nevertheless shape their present conditions. In particular, there may be a legacy of a highly gendered division of labour during marriage that may affect the ex-spouses’ earning trajectories beyond the date of divorce. Using register data from the German ...

Atypical Work, Financial Assets, and Asset Poverty in Germany

This study investigates how atypical employment (i.e., part-time, temporary work, mini-jobs) affects workers' ability to accumulate financial assets and exposes them to asset poverty in Germany. Asset poverty occurs when household financial resources (e.g., bank deposits and stock equity) are insufficient to live at the income poverty line for three months. Previously, studies on labour market processes ...

First Time around: Local Conditions and Multi-dimensional Integration of Refugees

We study the effect of local unemployment and attitudes towards immigrants at the time of arrival on refugees’ multi-dimensional integration outcomes. We leverage a centralized allocation policy in Germany where refugees were centrally assigned to live in specific counties. To measure sentiments of native residents towards immigrants, we use geo-coded Twitter data, which provides our “negative sentiment ...

Context, Health and Migration: A Systematic Review of Natural Experiments

Summary : Background Migration health research pays little attention to the places into which people migrate. Studies on health effects of contextual factors are often limited because of the ability of individuals to self-select their environment, but natural experiments may allow for the causal effect of contexts to be examined. The objective was to synthesise the evidence on contextual health effects ...

Parents' Life Satisfaction Prior to and Following Preterm Birth

The current study tested whether the reported lower wellbeing of parents after preterm birth, relative to term birth, is a continuation of a pre-existing difference before pregnancy. Parents from Germany (the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, N = 10,649) and the United Kingdom (British Household Panel Study and Understanding Society, N = 11,012) reported their new-born’s birthweight and gestational ...