In recent decades, many affluent democracies moved from traditional welfare states to workfare systems. Meanwhile, income inequality developed differently across countries, even when they made apparently similar shifts from welfare to workfare. It is a matter of debate why welfare state change had such heterogeneous consequences across countries. This article proposes that different incentives to take ...
Germany’s labour market has weathered the COVID-19 crisis quite well. The unemployment rate increased by less than one percentage point between the last pre-crisis quarter Q4 2019 and its peak in Q3 2020 (from 3.2% to 4.1%); the employment rate fell by less than five percentage points (from 75.7% to 71.1%). Both indicators have since returned to their pre-crisis levels (OECD, forthcoming[1]). The widespread ...
Economic inequality is rising globally and due to developments in information technologies and globalization, nowadays individuals are more exposed to such an inequality than ever. Recent studies show that exposure to inequality may shape economic decisions. In this article, we test whether contributions in the public goods game are sensitive to information about inequality of personal benefits between ...
We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-employed people’s mental health. Using representative longitudinal survey data from Germany, we reveal differential effects by gender: whereas self-employed women experienced a substantial deterioration in their mental health, self-employed men displayed no significant changes up to early 2021. Financial losses are important in explaining these ...
Tackling climate change and keeping global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels is one of the major and most challenging issues that our societies are facing. Households are among the prime contributors to annual greenhouse gas emissions, with twenty percent of emissions being generated by residential energy consumption. Therefore, understanding individual decision-making ...
This study estimates the lifetime effects of lost instructional time in the classroom on labor market outcomes. For identification, I use historical shifts in the starting date of the school year in Germany, which substantially shortened the duration of the affected school years with no adjustments in the core curriculum. The lost in-school instruction was mainly substituted by additional homework ...
Population ageing poses growing challenges to social security systems, in particular to public pension funds. The study analyses how Working Life Expectancy (WLE) and Healthy Working Life Expectancy (HWLE) in terms of three health indicators developed in Germany. Based on the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) from 2002 to 2018 (n = 211,141), time trends in labour force rates, mental and physical ...
In Deutschland hat sich in den vergangenen Jahren einiges getan im Hinblick auf die gesetzliche Anerkennung von sexueller und Geschlechterdiversität; es ist es jedoch noch immer unzureichend erforscht, wie Menschen mit marginalisierten sexuellen Identitäten oder marginalisierten Geschlechtsidentitäten den Alltag in Deutschland erleben. In dieser Expertise wird das Vorkommen von Einsamkeit unter lesbischen, ...
Verfügen Eltern über keine guten Deutschkenntnisse, haben die Kinder deutliche Nachteile im deutschen Bildungssystem. Einer eigenen Auswertung des Soziooekonomischen Panels zufolge hatte im Jahr 2019 bei 10,5 Prozent der unter 16-Jährigen mindestens ein Elternteil und bei 5,2 Prozent hatten beide Elternteile keine guten Sprachfähigkeiten. Betrachtet man nur die rein fremdsprachigen Familien, lagen ...